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UNITED STATES OF AMERICA. 






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Unitarian Catechism 



BY 



M. J. SAVAGE 

WITH AN INTRODUCTION BY E. A. HORTON 



Price, Paper, per Copy, . 

" Do{. . 

" Cloth, " Copy, . 

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INTRODUCTION. 



The preface by Mr. Savage gives the reasons, clearly and concisely, why a book 
like this is needed. It answers a great demand, and it will supply a serious deficiency. 
Having had the privilege of reading the contents very thoroughly, I gladly record my 
satisfaction in the character of the work, my hope of its wide acceptance and use, my 
appreciation of the author's motives in preparing it. The questions and answers allow 
of supplementing, of individual handling, of personal direction. It is not a hard-and- 
fast production. There is a large liberty of detail, explanation, and unfolding. The 
doctrinal positions are in accord with rational religion and liberal Christianity, the criti- 
cal judgments are based on modern scholarship, and the great aim throughout is to assist 
an inquirer or pupil to a positive, permanent faith. If any one finds comments and 
criticisms which at first sight seem needless, let it be remembered that a Unitarian cat- 
echism must give reasons, point out errors, and trace causes : it cannot simply dogma- 
tize. I am sure that in the true use of this book great gains will come to our Sunday- 
schools, to searchers after truth, to our cause. 

Edward A. Horton. 

AUTHOR'S PREFACE. 

This little Catechism has grown out of the needs of my own work. Fathers and 
mothers have said to me, " Our children are constantly asking us questions that we can- 
not answer." Perfectly natural ! Their reading and study have not been such as to 
make them familiar with the results of critical scholarship. The great modern revolu- 
tion of thought is bewildering. This is an attempt to make the path of ascertained truth 
a little plainer. 

This is the call for help in the home. Besides this, a similar call has come from 
the Sunday-school. Multitudes of teachers have little time to ransack libraries and 
study large works. This is an attempt, then, to help them, by putting in their hands, in 
brief compass, the principal tilings believed by Unitarians concerning the greatest 
subject. 

The list of reference books that follows the questions and answers will enable 
those who wish to do so to go more deeply into the topics suggested. 

It is believed that this Catechism will be found adapted to any grade of scholars 
above the infant class, provided the teacher has some skill in the matter of interpretation. 

GEO. H. ELLIS, Publisher, 141 Franklin St., Boston, Mass. 






Mr. Savage's Books. 



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Mr. Savage's weekly sermons are regularly printed in pamphlet 
form in " Unity Pulpit." Subscription price, for the season, $1.50; 
single copies, 5 cents. 

GEO. H. ELLIS, Publisher, 

141 Franklin St., Boston, Mass. 



LIFE 




M. J. SAVAGE 



OF 



r<** copyrigh 






NOV 19 ' / 



BOSTON 

GEO. H. ELLIS, 141 FRANKLIN STREET 

1890 



^ 

^ 



Copyright 

By George H. Ellis 

1890 



CONTENTS. 



I. Nature and Origin of Life, 9 

II. Is Man more than Animal? 23 

III. The Method of Evolution, 37 

IV. The Problem of Pain, 54 

V. The Individual Soul under Law, 73 

VI. Goodness and Moral Evil, 89 

VII. My Life's Meaning, 103 

VIII. A Human Life, 116 

IX. Work and Play, 129 

X. Wealth and Poverty, 142 

XI. Mr. Bellamy's Nationalism, 158 

XII. Other Social Dreams, 177 

XIII. Moralities and Morality, 195 

XIV. Religions and Religion, 211 

XV. What is it all for? 224 



NATURE AND ORIGIN OF LIFE. 



I begin this morning a series of sermons on " Life." My 
purpose in it will be to take up and consider some of those 
difficulties, practical problems, which weary the brain of so 
many and burden the heart. It may seem at first sight an 
ambitious project ; and yet I do not claim any unusual, any 
peculiar source of knowledge on any of these great themes, — 
only, out of the careful study of many years, a study, earnest, 
loving, hopeful, it is possible that there may come to you 
some thoughts with which you are not entirely familiar, some 
suggestions that will be of practical help. So, in a simple 
quiet way, I undertake to oifer you what aid I can in settling 
some of these difficulties that environ our thinking and our 
living. 

My subject this morning is " The Nature and Origin of 
Life." You will not think me presumptuous enough to sup- 
pose that I can settle off-hand a question like this, which has 
been the great sealed question of all the ages. And yet, 
as the world gets older and a little wiser, it does approach 
nearer, I believe, to the solution. For I am one of those 
who do not believe in any unknowable, — I only believe in 
the Unknown. We are finite beings in an infinite universe, 
and this is at once our despair and our hope, — our despair, 
so far as solving all questions this year or the next is con- 
cerned; our hope, as showing spread out before us an infi- 



io Life 

nite field for study, an endless road along which we may 
advance. 

What, then, is life ? I will begin by calling your attention 
to one of the lowest and most simple forms of organic life 
with which we are familiar. If you will take a small bit 
of fresh and healthy substance, either animal or vegetable, 
and place it in a little wineglass of water and let it be there 
for some time in a sunny place, in a warm room, you will 
find that, after a few days, it will be swarming with life, — 
little forms of organic life that are called amoebae. An 
amceba is only a little jelly-like globule ; but it possesses most 
wonderful powers, and has within itself the promise and the 
potency of such development as that of which we cannot 
even yet dream the end. This little creature, hardly to be 
called organic in the ordinary sense at all, is yet endowed 
with certain marvellous faculties. Let me describe it, so far 
as the main distinctions are concerned between it and the 
other kind of matter which we call dead, which I prefer to 
call inorganic, because, as we shall see very soon, we have 
outgrown the use of the word " dead " as applied to anything 
in this universe. 

This little creature, then, in the first place, can feel. It 
possesses this wondrous something called sensation. In the 
next place, it possesses the power of spontaneous movement. 
It does not necessarily remain in the place where you put it 
or where you first see it, as ordinary matter does. It has 
the power of assimilating food, which no inorganic matter 
possesses. Matter, as we know it, in its forms that we ordi- 
narily call lifeless, may grow by accretion, by crystallization ; 
but it does not grow by assimilation. Only a living thing 
can take of something outside itself, and by a process of 
assimilation or digestion make it a part of its own organic 
being. Then, through this process of taking into itself sub- 



Nature and Origin of Lift n 

stances and making them its own, it possesses that other 
quality of life which we speak of as growth. And, then, it 
possesses that marvellous power of reproduction, so that the 
line of life is continued day after day, year after year, age 
after age. 

These are the main essential qualities that separate what 
we call dead matter from living things, or the inorganic from 
the organic. I wish, however, to refer briefly to one or two 
other peculiarities. All living things pass through the cycle 
represented by the words "birth," "growth," "death." And, 
then, there is one more peculiarity, which will constitute the 
starting-point for further investigation as to what this strange 
thing is that we call life. It has a chemical constitution pe- 
culiarly its own, — entirely unlike the substance of any inor- 
ganic matter. And, though chemists may take it to pieces 
as much as they please, though they may discover its com- 
ponent parts, every element that enters into it, no man has 
ever yet succeeded in putting it together again. No chemist 
has ever created the most infinitesimal particle of living sub- 
stance. So here, then, the difference between a live amoeba 
and a dead one is the difference between materialism and 
spiritualism, the difference between a dead world and a liv- 
ing one. And right in there is the centre, the crucial point 
of the great problem that has faced all the ages, and which, 
when solved, will contain within itself the key to the meaning 
of the universe. 

Let us now, then, raise the question, What is the difference 
between the live amoeba and the dead amoeba ? Where did 
the life come from ? Can we trace anything in regard to its 
origin ? There are two or three so-called theories that it is 
worth our while for a few moments to consider, though one 
of them — and that which is most commonly in people's 
minds, the popular theory, so to speak, of the last eighteen 



12 Life 

hundred years, perhaps of most of the past history of man 
— cannot, in the proper use of language, be spoken of as 
a theory at all. People have been accustomed to say that 
life originated on this planet by the direct creative act of 
God, God being looked upon as a being outside the world, 
with a certain substance called dead matter as the material 
with which he was to work. So the naive story in Genesis 
represents God coming down to earth, shaping some of this 
dead matter into the likeness of bird, animal, plant, and 
man, and breathing into these what is called the breath of 
life, — that is, suddenly taking something which is dead and 
conferring life upon it, — a something added to its substance, 
or something incorporated in it, somehow and somewhere. 
And yet, — though, as I said, this is called a theory, — if you 
stop and consider it a moment, it is no theory at all. For 
what is a theory? A theory is an attempt to explain or 
account for certain facts. But here we have no fact, only a 
supposed or assumed fact, for which an explanation is also 
supposed or assumed. All assumption from beginning to 
end. And even though we knew that God in some mysteri- 
ous way simply said, " Let man be," and, where it was blank 
a moment before, a full-grown man stood, — even that would 
be no explanation ; for an explanation enters into the process, 
tells something as to the how. The ordinary theory of 
creation, then, as it is called, is no true theory at all, and is 
no explanation of what still remains the same mystery that 
it was before. 

There is another theory that has been advanced as to the 
origin of life on this planet. You are familiar, I suppose, 
with the fact that there are thousands of meteors falling on 
this earth from somewhere in the sky, as we are on our 
cyclic journey every year. What are they ? They are little 
broken fragments of other planets, asteroids. It has been 



Nature and Origin of Life 13 

supposed by some that life might have been sown, so to 
speak, on this planet of ours by these broken fragments of 
another planet on which life had existed before it was 
destroyed. All this is conceivable ; it is possible ; it is a 
theory. And yet it does not help us one whit ; for the ques- 
tion still arises, Though life came to this planet from some 
other planet in space, how did it come on that other planet? 
And, though we have a line of planets reaching back into the 
past, through millions of ages, still the question confronts the 
investigating thought of the inquirer as to where the first life 
came from ; for life must have begun on some planet, or else 
it must have always existed. 

Another theory is that of " spontaneous generation." In- 
genious tests have been made by many scientific men. But 
no life has yet been obtained except from previous life. So 
this theory, so far, is entirely wanting in proof. 

I shall not assume so much as an attempt at answering 
this great question this morning, any further than by way of 
suggestion. I believe it has been proved beyond all rational 
doubt that the gulf ordinarily assumed between dead matter 
and living matter is purely imaginary. There is no such 
thing as dead matter. There is matter which is beyond the 
range of your consciousness, and which so seems uncon- 
scious to you. And yet there is not one single infinitesimal 
particle or atom of matter throughout this infinite universe 
that is not pulsing with a part of the infinite life. There is 
no dead matter. Everywhere tireless, age-long, almighty 
activity, — nothing at rest, nothing dead. And what does 
this mean ? I believe, friends, that it means the one God 
and Father of all, in all, through all, — everywhere living, 
everywhere active, everywhere creative, so that, in all parts 
of the universe where anything lives, it is the natural out- 
blossoming of this infinite life, — as natural as the bursting 



14 Life 

of the soil in the spring by the green blade of grass. Life 
everywhere outflowering as a part of the manifestation of this 
infinite, one, eternal life, — our God, our Father. 

This I offer you, friends, not as demonstrated science, but 
as the most rational thought which I can frame, and — mark 
you this — as being contradictory to no science, to no knowl- 
edge, that is possessed by any one in the world. Rational, 
and in accord with all that we know, is this theory as to the 
origin of life. 

Now, what is this life ? I will call your attention to it in 
this, one of the lowest life forms, the amceba. Here is a 
little creature that has no hands, and yet that can suddenly 
protrude a part of its own body to serve as a hand, which is 
absorbed again into the general mass. It has no mouth, and 
yet any part of its substance suddenly becomes a mouth 
when the call is made for it, so that it can take into itself 
other substance as food. A creature that has no legs or fins 
or wings, and yet can protrude parts of its substance to serve 
the purpose of legs or fins or power of locomotion. Here is 
this little creature, then. I wish now to ask you to note 
some of the steps in the onward and upward movement of 
this mysterious thing, life, that we may get some hint as to the 
overmastering wonder of it all. 

Trace now this life : what does it do ? It has no eyes at 
first. But the life goes on in process of time to create eyes ; 
and so this universe, dark before, becomes all alive with 
light, glorious with color, more than even we have ever 
imagined or dreamed. That is to say, in some way the pul- 
sating movements of this ether that surrounds all forms of 
life create in the brain of those that have first created for 
themselves eyes all these marvellous sensations of color. 
This lowest form of life has no ears ; but it goes on, and in 
the process of time creates ears, — ears which come out to 



Nature and Origin of Life 15 

respond to these rhythmic wave-motions of the ether again, 
until all the cries and sounds and songs, all the harmonies of 
the world, echo in these wonderful chambers of the brain. 
This sensitive creature has no nervous system at first, no 
brain, no spinal cord, of course ; but it goes on, and in the 
process of time this life creates the spinal cord and the 
nervous system and the brain, and so comes into contact 
with all the wonderful life of the world, receiving its de- 
spatches from the farthest star, from the deepest mines, from 
all over the universe, and translating them into thought, into 
meaning, in these wondrous brains. 

Of course you know there was a long period in the life of 
this planet when the highest form of life was to be found in 
the fishes and in the sea. But this same one life that we 
found in the amoeba and which had climbed up into the fish 
did not stop there. It went on, until all the manifold forms 
of reptilian life covered the globe, and everywhere creatures 
that we now hardly know how to classify, — creatures with 
reptilian characteristics, creatures with wings, who could live 
partly in the water, partly on the land, partly in the air. 
But still the life was not content : it went on climbing still, 
until it took on all the million forms of birdlike beauty. 
And these wonderful creatures flew and sang between the 
green of the earth and the blue of the far-off sky. But still 
the life was not content. It climbed up into mammalian 
forms, — all the wonderful animals of the world that have 
trodden its forests, that have ranged its vast steppes and 
plains. But still not content. By and by, in some far-off 
aeon, so distant and dim that we cannot trace it, the forms 
that were prostrate had climbed up until at last a creature 
stood on its feet : its fore feet had become arms ; and there 
was the first manifestation of that form of life that we 
have come to call human. There was a man on the earth. 



1 6 Life 

However crude, however ignorant, however savage, hov/ever 
brutal in his characteristics, however unlike that which we 
attach to the word now, a man stood upon the earth and 
lifted his face towards heaven, and began to wonder what 
those far-off points of light might mean, and began to say 
"I," to wonder what sort of a being he was, what the great 
life must be that was manifested in all external forms and 
movements of nature outside himself. And then this life 
seized the brain and developed it until it has become the 
dominant power of the world. 

And what has this life achieved through the ministry of 
man ? This life that we saw in this lowest, tiniest creature 
climbed into man and did what ? Organized himself first 
into the family, then into the tribe, and then, seizing upon 
the idea of a vast social order, created kingdoms and peo- 
ples, — a world-wide empire like that of Rome, the embodi- 
ment of law, of order ; changing the face of the earth, 
building roads to the most distant provinces, establishing 
communication between tribe and tribe and people and 
people, and carrying on that idea of government, of the 
social order until, mightier than Rome and freer than man 
ever was before since the morning stars sang together, we 
have our own grand Republic. 

Here is one thing that this mysterious life has done. 
What else ? This life that started without eye or ear caught 
a glimpse of that infinite vision of the world's beauty ; and, 
first through crude scratchings upon stones or upon smooth 
pieces of bone or ivory, and through rude statues, coarse 
imitations of the human shape, it climbed, at last, until it 
blossomed out into all the art of Greece, the Renaissance of 
Italy, all the painting and statuary of the modern world. 

Here is another thing that this life has done. What else ? 
The life that started without ears caught a far-off echo of 



Nature and Origin of Life 17 

sound, which grew until, from the first rude cries, the sough 
of the wind in the tree-tops, the sob of the wave on the 
shore, there has been developed all the magnificent work of 
all the masters, creating symphonies and oratorios and 
operas that voice and give expression to that which cannot 
be expressed in the heart and fear and hope of man. 

What else ? This life dreamed of a right and a wrong, 
and morality is born, — born first as a little social fact of 
the relation of one man to another, until to-day the universe 
is to our thought the embodiment and the eternal consecra- 
tion of morality, — of all that is good and fair and sweet and 
true. 

What else did this life do ? This life first stood in awe 
of something outside itself, — a curious stick, a stone, the 
lightning zigzagging across the skies, the wind drifting a 
cloud before it over the blue, — no matter what. There 
dawned upon the consciousness of this life the thought of 
another life that was not itself, that was in and through the 
things that were about it. And out of this have come all 
the religions of the world, — this life, on bended knee and 
with uplifted face, daring to think that there is a father-life 
in the things above and beyond itself, and reaching up its 
helpless hand in the darkness to touch this life, to be helped, 
be led by it. 

This life has done one more thing. It has not only cre- 
ated all that we see of true and noble, fair and good, but it 
has dared to dream, — where did it get its dream ? — dared 
to dream of a fairer world than it ever saw, dared to dream 
of a better humanity than it ever saw, dared to dream of a 
higher truth than it ever saw, of a grander justice than it 
ever saw, has dared to dream of a perfect world. Where 
did it get its dream ? Did it come out of the dirt at one's 
feet? 



1 8 Life 

What, then, is this wondrous life ? Friends, it seems to 
me that, when we trace it from its lowest manifestations 
until we gain some feeble glimpses of its highest, it is ab- 
surd to think that this life is anything less or anything else 
than a part of the infinite Life itself ; for that which we see 
in the grass-blade, that which you see in one of these 
flowers, that which you see in one of the stars over our 
heads, is also that which you see in the man of Galilee, 
which you see in the brain of Shakspere, — the one life from 
lowest to highest, and not yet through, only en route, — to 
where ? This life, friends, I believe to be only manifesta- 
tions as the years go by, out-blossomings everywhere of that 
life which is God, — the mystery and yet the explanation of 
all things. 

I shall have something further to say next Sunday morn- 
ing as to the difference in kind or degree — a difference in 
degree, which perhaps amounts to a difference in kind — 
between this life as manifested in the lower forms and in 
man, so I will leave it where it is for to-day. 

I wish now, after so much of hinting as to the origin, the 
nature, the wonder, the glory, of this great thing that we call 
life, to hint to you a little as to the probable distribution — 
quantity — of this life in the universe. It means very little 
to us that everything is alive. But, when you consider that 
every drop of water which you drink when you are athirst is 
a little world crowded with life, when you reflect that there 
is not an inch of the surface of this globe that is not thrill- 
ing, thronging, with countless forms of life, when you reflect, 
as Lowell sings in " Sir Launfal," that 

" There is not a leaf or blade too mean 
To be some happy creature's palace," 

when you reflect that the world is all one grand manifesta- 
tion of innumerable forms of life, from those that are too 



Nature and Origin of Life 19 

small for the microscope to discover to those that are the 
mightiest in structure and organization, — then you get a 
starting-point, so far as this little world of ours is concerned. 

But is this world the only one that is alive or is peopled 
with forms of life ? Friends, it was a rational speculation a 
few years ago to consider as to whether or not there was 
more than one inhabited world. But it is no longer reason- 
able even to raise the question. We are practically sure 
that there are countless inhabited worlds. We have learned, 
at last, that the substance which goes to the making of the 
most distant suns is precisely the same as that which enters 
into the composition of this poor old earth underneath our 
feet. So we know it is one substance and one life every- 
where ; and we know, furthermore, that every one of these 
points of light that dot the blue at night is not a planet, but 
it is a sun, and each of these suns is surrounded by its own 
little group and family of planets and moons, precisely as is 
our sun. 

Not all the worlds that surround these distant suns are 
peopled. We know concerning our own, for example, that 
there are probably only one or two planets in this group that 
are in such a condition as to be habitable by the kind of life 
which there is here. I say the kind of life ; for it is quite 
possible for us to imagine different kinds of creatures to 
inhabit planets in a condition such as we cannot now con- 
ceive of easily, just as we know there are creatures here that 
can live underground and in water just as well as in air. 
But there are probably in these distant heavens that we gaze 
at so wonderingly, so lovingly at night, countless worlds in 
process of growth, not yet ready to be peopled. Then there 
are others containing only the lowest forms of life, as our 
earth did some millions of years ago. Then there are others, 
perhaps, that have reached the stage where fishes can live 



20 Life 

and find their home, others that have reached the reptilian 
stage, others still that have reached the point where birds 
fly and sing and are at home ; others that have gone a step 
higher, until animals roam the forests ; others, perhaps, 
where, if we could only reach that far-off world, we might 
find the much-speculated-about creature, primeval man, — 
life first taking on the shape that we are accustomed to call 
human. And then, for aught we know, there may be worlds 
that have progressed thousands of years beyond where we 
are to-day. It is not an unreasonable speculation to suppose 
that they may have reached a height of spiritual attainment 
so that there is open communion between themselves and 
the other spiritual creatures that inhabit eternity. I say it 
is not an unreasonable speculation. I do not advance it as 
a fact. This universe, then, is all alive, thrilling and throb- 
bing with countless forms of being, more wonderful than we 
can yet imagine. 

And now, at the end, I wish only to suggest one or two 
points, which, though not practical in the ordinary, small, 
petty way of what we commonly call practical, yet seem to 
me to be practical in the grandest sense of the term. 

We have been endowed with this wonderful thing called 
life, or rather we have been called into being as expressions 
or manifestations of this wonderful thing called life. And 
we are in a universe infinite in range and infinite in outlook 
and alive all through. With what ringing power, then, ought 
to come to you the challenge of those words uttered hun- 
dreds and hundreds of years ago by one of the sacred 
writers, when he says, " Seeing we are compassed about 
with so great a cloud of witnesses, let us lay aside every 
weight, and run with patience the race that is set before us" ! 

Think what a magnificent thing it means merely to be 
alive in a universe like this ! No matter where you are now, 



Nature and Origin of Life 21 

how much you may have attained or not attained, through 
what failures you may have passed or what successes, 
whether you be poor or rich, whether you be ignorant or 
wise, you have set your foot upon the highway of the King; 
and that highway, running out and out along the star-lighted 
vista, loses itself from sight, from thought, even from dream, 
but does not end, so far as you can see. What may not be, 
then, for any of us who have started on this grand journey ? 
Do not be impatient, then, with the conditions of life, its 
troubles, its trials. Let us rise to a comprehension of its 
grandeur, and determine that we will play our part worthily 
in a calling high as this. 

I wish to read to you at the close a few lines, familiar 
already to many of you j but I read them because they are a 
simple, unpretending attempt to give voice to the wonder of 
this great fact of life : — 

O wonder of the world, whose surface bright 
Fills wide-eyed childhood with a fresh delight 
Beneath the surface, to exploring eyes 
Deep yawns to deep, and heights on heights arise. 

Each grass-blade and each gaseous atom holds 
An infinite mystery that his thought enfolds, 
Who knows each molecule the kinsman is 
Of every star ray piercing the abyss. 

And not one lily blossom in the vale 
But to the instructed ear can tell a tale 
Whose opening chapter was the eternal past, 
And is not done while endless ages last. 

Short is his fathom line who thinks he sounds — 
And finds it shallow — being's dread profounds ! 
The emptiness is in the pool that lies 
Too shoal to hold the stars and boundless skies. 



22 Life 

Oh, when I look upon the laughing face 
Of children, or on woman's gentle grace, 
Or when I grasp a true friend by the hand, 
And feel a bond I partly understand, — 

When mountains thrill me, or when by the sea 
The plaintive waves rehearse their mystery, 
Or when I watch the moon with strange delight, 
Treading her pathway mid the stars of night, — 

Or when the one I love, with kisses pressed, 
I clasp with bliss unspoken to my breast, — 
So strange, so deep, so wondrous life appears, 
I have no words, but only happy tears. 

To-day I think and hope, and so for this, 

If it must be, for just so much of bliss, — 

Bliss threaded through with pain, — I bless the power 

That holds me up to gaze one wondrous hour. 






IS MAN MORE THAN ANIMAL? 



" Is man more than animal ? " asks the nameless old He- 
brew singer. "Know thyself," as if this were the begin- 
ning and end of all knowledge, echoes the wise old Greek. 
Let it be our purpose, then, this morning, so far as we are 
able, to consider a little carefully what sort of beings we are, 
what our place is in nature. For, if we can find out this, the 
resulting obligations will be plain to any thoughtful mind. 

Whatever else we are, it is plain to even the most super- 
ficial observation that we are animals. On whatever theory 
we may consider the subject, whether we take the old idea 
of outright creation or whether we accept the scientific doc- 
trines of Mr. Darwin and his fellow-laborers, it makes no 
difference as to this point, — we are animals. Whether we 
were created outright in a second of time or whether man 
is the outblossoming of the topmost twig of a tree of life 
that is millions of years old, still this is plain, — we are 
animals. 

I wish to call your attention again — I have done it before 
more than once, maybe — to what, to my mind, is a striking, 
significant fact as indicating the place that man occupies in 
relation to the other forms of animal life. The lowest creat- 
ures that live and crawl over the earth or float in the waters 
are, as you know, horizontal in position, of very simple 
structure, of a very low type of nervous organization, — pos- 
sessing no brain, in the proper sense of the word. But, as 
life develops, a striking change appears. The nervous sys- 
tem becomes more complex ; there is a stronger and stronger 



24 Life 

tendency towards the development of a brain ; there is a 
gradual lifting of the very form itself, up through the reptile, 
bird, mammal, until at last man stands, by contradistinction 
to the lowest forms of life, perpendicular, with his feet upon 
the earth and his head pointing to the far-off heavens. And, 
in the course of this development, not only have there gone 
on appropriate accompanying changes of physical structure, 
but such a development of brain, of the organ of intelli- 
gence, as leaves all other creatures hopelessly behind in the 
race of development. But still, standing on his feet, having 
turned what were the fore feet of the animal into hands, 
having developed this wondrous power of thought, so that he 
looks before and after and questions all things and dreams 
all things, — still he remains an animal. 

Let us see now for a moment what it is that he shares 
with his fellow-animals beneath and about him. In the first 
place, his physical structure and constitution ; in the next 
place, consciousness, or the power of feeling ; and once more 
still, a power of thought, — for animals think as truly as do 
men. And, then, animals possess the power of memory. 
They carry somewhere in the bram or mind the recollection 
of yesterday, of last year, so that they become attached 
to persons, to places with which they are associated, and 
have almost a human gladness in rediscovering again these 
places endeared to them by old associations. 

Animals also have the power of forelooking, or anticipa- 
tion. They can expect something that is to come this after- 
noon or to-morrow, and take their animal delight in this 
anticipation. Any one who has ever gone out with a keen- 
scented dog on the hunt needs no further argument than to 
watch the kindling of the eye and how alive he is all over in 
expectation of the joy which he shares with his master 
hunter. 



Is Man more tJian Animal 25 

And, then, animals have the power to dream. This is one 
of the great mysteries of human nature that no science has 
yet solved. What is this dream ? What is this activity of 
the mind while all the senses are asleep, — that lives over 
the past, that anticipates the future, that makes journeys 
quick as a flash of thought ? We do not know what it is, 
but we know that animals share it with us. 

Animals, again, share with us a certain kind and degree of 
the power of loving. They love their young ; they love their 
companions, their mates, their associates ; and they carry 
this love so far, sometimes, that it develops that which we 
are accustomed to think of generally, perhaps, as purely 
human, — a power of self-sacrifice, of patient suffering, of 
long waiting and endurance for the sake of the object 
loved. 

Animals have the power of friendship. They become at- 
tached to some of their companions in a way that might 
shame the faith of our human associations. And then, 
again, they often possess at least the rudiments of what we 
are accustomed to think of as morality. I shall show you in 
a moment how wide the gulf is between this morality that is 
possible to the animal life and that ideal and higher moral- 
ity which characterizes only the highest type of the human. 
But animals are capable of becoming so dominated by the 
ideas, the wishes, the will, of a master whom they not only 
fear, but love, that, when they have transgressed this master- 
ful will, — when they have done that which they have been 
taught, not to be wrong, — for an animal can have no sense 
of what we mean by the abstract term wrong, — but that 
which the master desired to be done or refrained from, — 
they are capable of showing fear, shame, almost penitence 
(sorrow, at any rate) that they have grieved and disobeyed 
the master that they love. 



26 Life 

Animals share with us, then, all these faculties, qualities, 
characteristics. I turn now, however, to raise the question 
as- to what peculiarities and characteristics we possess that 
separate us by a gulf that, so far as we can see, the animal 
possesses no power to bridge or leap. What is it that makes 
us men above and beyond the animal world ? This question 
I ask, and now proceed to answer. 

i. I have said that the animal possesses a rudimentary 
kind of morality. But morality in the highest sense — that 
which deserves the name, that which constitutes the high- 
est and noblest quality and characteristic of humanity — the 
animal does not share with us. What is that ? We need to 
be educated and lifted somewhat in this realm of thought 
and life ourselves before we can appreciate the distinction 
that separates us from our lower neighbors. If any man be 
moral merely because he is afraid of a master, whether that 
master be on earth or in the heavens, — whether the whip- 
ping that he expects be anticipated here or in some far-off 
world, — if that be his conception of what it is to be moral, 
then, in that particular, he is not above the animal. He 
shares his morality only with his horse and his dog. Moral- 
ity, in the true sense of the word, means a clear conception 
of that which is just and right in our relations with our fel- 
low-men, and the desire to measure out to our fellows, not a 
patronizing benevolence, not to give them what they can 
take because we are not strong enough to keep it, but care- 
fully and earnestly to give to them that which is theirs by 
right, — theirs as equal sons of God, theirs as equal sharers 
with us of the earth, its opportunities and its hopes of the 
future. 

This is morality, and this only is worthy of the name. 
And here, when we have risen to this, is one of the grand 
points of separation between us and the animal world. 



Is Man more than Animal 2J 

There is no possibility of our conceiving even that any 
animal, however highly developed, should attain to this ab- 
stract idea of right, to this sense of justice. An animal, out 
of love for its offspring, may deny itself food ; for the sake of 
a friend — I have known such cases — it may put itself to 
inconvenience and suffering. But this is following the in- 
stinctive leading of love. There is no thought between one 
dog and another that "this belongs to you and does not 
belong to me, — it is just and right that I should treat you so 
and so, and that you should treat me after this or that 
manner." This conception of justice, of essential right, — 
this idea of the abstract relationships in which we stand to 
others, so that they have claims upon us and we have obliga- 
tions towards them, — this is peculiarly, distinctively human. 
And, as I said, there seems no conceivable way by which 
the animal can ever become a sharer with us in this pecul- 
iarly human characteristic. For, if once an animal should 
be found to possess a quality like this, we should say, " Here 
is no longer a dog or a horse : here is, no matter in what 
shape, something that is human." 

2. The second characteristic that I will mention as sepa- 
rating us from all of the lower forms of life on earth is the 
simple ability to say "I." I called your attention to the 
fact that the animals are conscious. But there is a gulf 
between that and this other thing that is stated only by add- 
ing a word with a hyphen, — self-conscious. Only man has 
this self-consciousness which says, " I," — which asks, 
"What am I?" — which raises the question, "Where did 
I come from?" — which considers the nature of man, the 
relation in which he stands to the world around us, to other 
beings whether visible or invisible. This power of saying 
"I," of questioning all the world, — this is human, and be- 
longs only to man and those possible orders of being which 



28 Life 

are above man. It belongs to nothing that is beneath the 
level of humanity. 

3. And then there is another characteristic which marks 
us off by an impassable gulf from the animal world ; and 
that is the fact that man is by nature a religious animal. I 
wish you to mark what I mean by this word " religious," its 
essence, its significance, — not merely to glance superficially 
over the world and see men bowed down and burdened, as 
they too frequently are, by the grossest and most supersti- 
tious fears under the name of religion. But the lowest, the 
crudest, the poorest, the most cruel type of religion that the 
world has ever seen, even that marks man off as above 
and beyond all possible types of life beneath him. What 
would you think if you saw an animal bowing its head in 
reverence, — an animal in the attitude or act of worship, of 
admiring something that he thought of as above and beyond 
him ? No matter, I say, in whatever crude, ignorant, super- 
stitious, cruel way a quality like this might manifest itself, — 
you see at a glance without any argument that it would lift 
the creature, so manifesting, infinitely, unspeakably, above all 
the lower forms of life on the planet. 

What does it mean ? It means the recognition on the 
part of man of a Power, a Being, that is not himself, — that 
he conceives of, however barbaric his notions may be, as 
higher than he, as mightier than he, as stronger, grander, 
finer, better than he ; a Being that he is intimately con- 
nected with in some way, so that his destiny depends on the 
relation in which he stands to him. Here is the essence of 
religion. It is this thought of a Being, a Power, not myself, 
that was here before I was, that will be here when I am dust 
again, that manifests itself in the far-off heavens, that swings 
the old earth in her orbit, — whose power in some way gives 
us the light of the sun, the change of seasons, that is in and 



Is Man more than Animal 29 

back of and through all this marvellous panorama of life. 
This is the essence of religion, and this, as I said, even in 
the poorest and most barbaric peoples, lifts the man infi- 
nitely above all his fellow-animals on the globe. 

4. And then there is another characteristic, and that is 
one that I have called your attention to often, but need to 
emphasize here again in this present relation j and that is the 
power of the ideal. You do not half realize, friends, what a 
wonderful, mighty, far-reaching, all-shaping thing it is, — this 
power of yours to dream. Suppose you found a flock of 
birds dreaming about a better way of living, puzzling their 
brains as to how to construct for themselves better homes, 
raising the question as to the conditions of health and dis- 
ease among birds, as to how they could build themselves a 
city, a civilization, in which the evils of their present condi- 
tion should be outgrown, left behind, — suppose you should 
find the slightest hint of anything like this in the midst of 
any of the lower forms of life, you would take your shoes 
from off your feet and bare your head with reverence as in 
the presence of something so much above and beyond what 
you had ever imagined there as to make you feel that you 
were in the presence of the Divine. 

Man, and man alone, then, has this power of dreaming, 
this power of imagining a better condition of things than he 
ever saw. Did you ever ask yourselves the question, Where 
did he get it? You find yourselves overwhelmed with the 
impossibility of an answer this side the foot of the Throne. 
Did this dream of a better thing blossom out of the worse, 
the poorer things ? Does the sense of cleanliness blossom 
out of filth ? of health out of disease ? of happiness out of 
pain ? of morality out of wrong ? Do these higher, finer 
qualities inhere in the dust, in molecules, in aggregations of 
matter, — this intangible, invisible, — this thing that cannot 



3° Life 

be weighed, that cannot be measured, — this that is of no 
color, unlike anything in all the physical universe, and yet 
that is mightier than the power of gravity, that is able to lift, 
to lure, to lead the thoughts, the consciences, the hearts, 
the fears, the hopes of man ? Here is something that puts 
us unspeakably above and beyond any form of animal life 
that the world has ever seen. 

5. One other thing closely linked with this. Perhaps 
some of you will be a little startled at my mentioning it as 
one of the signs of human glory ; but I do mention it fear- 
lessly as the one thing, perhaps, above almost all others, 
that has in it the promise and potency of all that it is pos- 
sible for man to become. I mention the fact of sin. It is 
usually spoken of as the one hopeless, disgraceful thing of the 
race. And yet, friends, right in that one word, interpret it 
how you will, lies the hope of man. What is this being who 
climbs up into the high places of his own nature and looks 
down upon himself, and says, "I was wrong there ; I ought to 
be ashamed of myself ; I am ashamed ; I will turn away from 
it, and do it no more " ? What is this strange thing ? It 
means, friends, that man is growing. It means that he is rec- 
ognizing imperfections, that he is putting his old self behind 
and beneath him, using it as stepping-stone on which to 
climb. 

Find me a race of beings, if you can, anywhere in the uni- 
verse, that has no sense of sin, no sense of its own imper- 
fection, no conscience, no self-condemnation, and I will point 
you to a race that will be forever stationary, that must stay 
just as it is in hopeless undevelopment. There is no hope 
for a man who is contented and satisfied with himself. 
There is no hope for an artist who has no longer an ideal 
beyond that which he has attained. There is hope only in 
this fact of self-condemnation and in this dream of the 



Is Man more than Animal 31 

better, and the determination that the present imperfect shall 
be turned into the future perfect. 

6. One more characteristic do I need to mention to com- 
plete the list; and that is that man has the power of abstract 
thought and besides of expressing this thought by artificial 
symbols and signs. An animal may be quite capable of 
noticing the fact that there is a difference between two 
things, — that one is longer than the other, or that one thing 
is sweet and another sour, — to be attracted by one color, to 
be repelled by another. But there is no trace anywhere of 
any animal's being capable of thinking the abstract thing, 
length, — that one thing is longer than another, — or the 
abstract quality of square or round, or red or blue, or high 
or low, of detaching thus the thought of these qualities from 
the things themselves. Much more is there no trace of their 
ability to express these thoughts by artificial words, signs, 
by written characters, so that speech and language shall be 
the result. 

And do you notice, friends, how this develops until it 
becomes a mightier distinction still than that which I have 
indicated, and how it helps in the development and the 
attainment of these other things that I have already noted ? 
For when man has attained this power of thought, and 
then of expressing that thought by a sound, and then ex- 
pressing that sound by an arbitrary symbol, — a mark which 
he may make with a pencil or a pen, or even with his finger 
in the sand, — then what ? He has the power of embodying 
not only his individual memory, but a world-memory, — cre- 
ating history ; and what does that mean ? It means writing 
the biography of the human race, so keeping trace of where 
we came from, by what steps we have advanced, to what 
end we are likely to attain. This no other race on earth 
can do. And in man's ability to do this lies the possibility 



32 Life 

of a race education, the possibility of remembering past 
errors, past mistakes, past failures in experiment, — the pos- 
sibility of leaving behind these errors, seeing them forever 
written there in memory as warning, and going on to the 
creation of the higher and finer things beyond anything we 
can now imagine. 

These, then, are some of the things that distinguish us from 
the lower, the animal life of the world. But now I come to 
raise another question, which, I know, from the many times it 
has been put me, is a practical difficulty with many in the 
thought of the modern world. They say : " If man is a soul 
or has a soul, where did he get it, and when, on the Darwin- 
ian theory ? Where does the soul come in ? " 

It always strikes me as curious when people ask this 
question in such a naive way, as though the difficulty never 
existed before ; for there is no more difficulty on the Darwin- 
ian theory of human nature and origin than there is on any 
other. The old traditional story is, you know, that man was 
made out of the dust ; and, after he was complete from head 
to foot, he was simply a lifeless form of dust, and his soul 
was breathed into him. Is there any more difficulty in 
having a soul breathed into a man after it has taken several 
thousands of years to create him than as though he were 
created in five minutes ? I cannot see that the problem is 
in the slightest degree changed, so far as any essential or 
natural difficulty is concerned. 

And, to show that there was a difficulty in the thought of 
the Old World, I will remind you that these things have been 
discussed, and thought over, time out of mind. The old 
theologians of the Middle Ages, the Church Fathers, had the 
question up for discussion repeatedly. There was one the- 
ory which they called Traducianism, — that is, the theory 
that the soul was derived from the parent in the act of gen- 






Is Man more than Animal 33 

eration, the same as the body was. Another was that of 
creationism, as they called it, — that a new soul was created 
for each new body at some time during its prenatal growth. 
A third theory was that of pre-existence, — that the souls had 
always existed, or at any rate had existed for millions of 
years, and that at the proper time a soul is furnished for 
a body when it is ready to receive it. 

These are the different theories that have been held and 
discussed in years gone by. I wish now to hint to you what 
seems to me a much more rational thought than either of 
these. I do not offer it to you as settled science. I offer 
it to you as the best thinking that, so far as I know, has 
been done on the subject. 

I told you last Sunday that no life has ever been dis- 
covered in this world that did not originate in pre-existing 
life. That is, so far as this planet is concerned, life pre- 
cedes form and creates form. I believe that this is an eter- 
nal and universal truth ; that, in the words of the old poet 
Spenser, — 

" For of the soul the body form doth take, 
For soul is form, and doth the body make." 

I believe that it is one life from the lowest manifestation to 
the highest, — that it is everywhere God, — the one life in the 
tiny blade of grass, the one life in the amceba, the one life 
in the fishes, in the reptiles, in the birds, in the mammals, 
in man. 

And when people ask me on this theory of the origin and 
development of life from the lowest forms why it is not 
necessarily true that all animals and all creatures that have 
ever lived are immortal, or else that man is not, I have what 
seems to me, at any rate, a reasonable answer. I have 
pointed out to you already that the one grand distinction be- 



34 Life 

tween man and the lower forms of life is the fact that man 
says," I," — that he is conscious of himself, — comes to be 
an ego, an entity. I believe, then, that, in all the lower 
forms of the world, the one life blossoms out and manifests 
itself in grass or flowers or insect or bird, and then that it 
falls back into the great life of the All, for the simple reason 
that it has not yet attained that which constitutes it an indi- 
vidual entity ; but that when in man the life does come to 
self-consciousness, and is able to say, "I," to think "God," to 
call him Father, — that then the immortal is born, then this 
self-conscious individuality becomes mighty enough to con- 
tinue, to look death in the face without fear, to change the 
body, the form which it has made for its temporary use, and 
shape to itself other body, other form, to fit it for other 
spheres of life and thought and activity. 

I offer you this, I say, not as settled knowledge, but as 
what seems to me the most reasonable thinking on this 
subject that I can anywhere discover. 

Now, then, at the end, one or two considerations. In 
what relation does this place us to the lower world beneath 
us ? There are two or three errors that it seems to me we 
ought to avoid. There have been, as you know, and there 
are still, people in the world who, believing in the pre-exist- 
ence and the transmigration of souls, look upon all animal life 
as sacred, — not because, as animal, it has any rights — un- 
derstand what attitude they really assume on this subject, — 
but only because, in looking upon a cat or a dog or a horse 
or a bird, they think they may be looking upon the tempo- 
rary housing of a human soul. Animal life, then, becomes 
sacred to them, not as animal life, but as possibly human life 
in disguise. Sometimes they worship these animal forms as 
being mysterious manifestations of divinity. We ourselves, 
it seems to me, are in danger of some errors in this direc- 



Is Man more than Animal 35 

tion, — either cruelty on the one hand and thoughtlessness 
concerning the rights of the lower world or else of an over- 
sensitiveness, endowing animals with nervous systems which 
they do not possess, with brain power which they do not pos- 
sess, and so standing in awe of our own mental creations, 
and not of the realities with which we ought to deal. We 
ought to reverence these lower forms of life as our undevel- 
oped brothers ; for it is the same one divine life in animals 
that is in us. And while we should not let them or their 
supposed rights stand in the way of the growth of civiliza- 
tion, — as some are disposed to do, I think, — still we should 
see to it that we measure out to them, not our generosity 
merely, not our pity, not our beneficence, but our justice, 
the same as we would to our fellow-men. They have rights 
as relating to us, and particularly when we take them into 
our companionship and make them our servants. And we 
ought to be as scrupulously just to our horse cr our dog as 
we are to a friend that has the gift of speech. 

But, on the other hand, let us consider, in the light of 
these differences between the animal and the man, what it 
means to be a man. Noblesse oblige, we say : nobility is ob- 
ligation. Change the phrase a little, and say, Ability is 
obligation. We demand of the lower world that they 
should come up to the measure of what is possible. We do 
not expect the dog to sing, but we do expect the bird to. 
We do not expect the dog to fly, but we do expect the bird 
to. The bird has these gifts of flight and song. We ex- 
pect a watch-dog to be faithful according to his breed and 
capacity, — to become what he is capable of becoming, in 
other words. 

Let us measure ourselves by no lesser, no poorer, no 
lower standard. And what will that mean for us ? It will 
mean that we take all of this part of us which we share with 



36 Life 

the animal world and place it in its proper relation to that 
which is higher, making it serve it. It will mean that we 
climb up into this self-consciousness of humanity, — into the 
ethical, into the religious, into the ideal, into the just, into 
the dream of that which shall be. 

To be a man, then, means thought, means justice, means 
reverence and worship, means love of all that is high and 
fair, means truth, means devotion to all those things on 
which the welfare of the world depends. And then, in view 
of the fact that we are growing, — en route, in process, not yet 
complete, — it means that we shall order each day of our 
lives in such a way that what we think and what we do shall 
make this afternoon and to-morrow fairer, easier, better, so 
that the world shall lift and rise ever towards something 
better, because this is of the nature of a man. 

Let us make this, then, our ideal. Let us constantly aim 
towards this. 

So shall the world grow finer year by year, 
And, lifting Godward, man be more divine, 
Until injustice, fading all away, 
Shall leave the old earth true and sweet and fair, 
As are the dreams we have of Paradise. 



THE METHOD OF EVOLUTION. 



In a conversation with an intelligent gentleman the other 
day, a business man, I was impressed anew with the fact 
that there needed more and more to be made clear the 
basis of this theory of evolution in the understanding and 
thought of the world. The popular impression seems to 
be something like this : Here is an old theory as to the 
origin of life on this planet, and as to the method by which 
the different forms of life have successively appeared as it 
has lifted upward stage by stage to man. This theory, it is 
thought, is not only old, but represents some indefinable 
wisdom of the ancient world. At any rate, it occupies the 
field. It is regarded as an intelligent and an intelligible 
theory, — venerable in the respect and reverence of ages. 
Evolution — or, in the narrower sense of the term, as applied 
to biology or the forms of life, Darwinism — is, on the other 
hand, looked upon as a sort of parvenu, an upstart that has, 
perhaps, a few facts seemingly in its favor, but that is not 
well established, and that comes to claim the thought, the 
recognition of the world, as displacing the old-time rever- 
enced, venerable ideas. And it is supposed, also, that the 
old theory is religious, has about it something of piety that 
the new has not, which is regarded as merely an intellectual 
or scientific speculation. I wish, therefore, to present be- 
fore you as clearly as I can at the outset this morning the 
comparative claims of these two theories. It will need only 
a word to do it. 



38 Life 

I say of these two theories in regard to which there is a 
popular misconception. One is the creation theory. I use 
the term purely by courtesy, and to save myself the trouble 
of roundabout expressions ; for, properly speaking, the crea- 
tion theory is not a theory at all, and has not one particle 
of claim for a moment's consideration in the court of the 
world's intelligence. How many people stop to think what 
it means or what it implies? What is the creation theory? 
Why, it means, to give you a concrete illustration, that God, 
— of course he does not do it with visible hands, for God is 
now, at any rate, not thought of as possessing parts and pas- 
sions like a man, but, — by the exercise of some mysterious 
power, God is supposed, for example, to bring together, 
scrape together, or get together in some fashion, particles of 
earth or dust that become shaped, let us say, into the form 
of a turtle or a bird, or whatever it may be ; and that, after 
it is shaped or formed, he confers life upon it. At the out- 
set, nothing : in a few moments, a fully formed animal, a bird, 
living. Brought into being, how ? Suddenly, instantaneously, 
by a fiat of will. It is utterly inconceivable, in the first place ; 
and, in the next place, — and this is the crucial point of the 
whole matter to which I ask your earnest and intelligent 
attention, — it is no theory at all ; for what is a theory ? A 
theory is a supposition, an hypothesis, a method by which 
to account for certain facts. Before you can have that 
which can properly be called a theory, then, you must have 
at least one fact ; and most men, before they proceed to the 
construction of a theory, have quite an assemblage of facts 
that the theory is supposed to account for or explain. Now, 
is there on the face of the earth, or has there ever been, a 
man who has witnessed an act of creation ? Did anybody 
ever look at blank air or blank earth, and suddenly see an 
animal or bird appear, as it were, out of nothing ? Even if 



The Method of Evolution 39 

such a thing were possible, — if I were looking at blank air, 
and then a moment afterwards saw a bird flying across the 
field of my vision, — how would I know that that bird had 
been suddenly created out of dust or out of nothing by the 
fiat of Almighty Power? You see, then, that, in favor of 
this supposition or so-called creation theory, there is not one 
single fact in all the world, — there never has been a fact in 
support of it observed by anybody. In the nature of things, 
there could not be a fact of this sort observed by anybody. 
It is, then, as I said, no theory, and utterly baseless : not 
one rag or shred, one single thread of fact, in support of it, 
has ever been observed from the beginning of the world. 

On the other hand, let us turn to evolution, or what is 
called "Darwinism," and see the standing of that. It means 
what ? It starts with the universally observed fact that never 
yet has any form of life been seen that was not derived from 
some preceding form, born from it, developed from it, grown 
out of it. And, from the beginning of the world, facts of 
this kind have been observed all over the world and every- 
where ; so that every fact that exists as touching this ques- 
tion is in favor of evolution, or Darwinism; and there are 
multitudes of facts increasing every year that have been 
observed bearing on this theory and supporting it ; so that, 
as between the two theories, the truth is here : one of them 
has absolutely nothing in its favor ; the other has all the 
knowledge that anybody possesses in its favor. Suppose 
you say, then, for the sake of the argument, — I would not 
admit it, however, — that it has not been demonstrated as 
true. As between two possible theories, one of which has no 
evidence and the other has even a little, what would be the 
choice of an intelligent and unprejudiced man ? Not only 
one of them has no evidence, but the other has a mass of 
evidence that it would take years to study and comprehend. 



40 Life 

How stands the problem, then ? Why, plainly here we are 
facing two, — let us say possibilities, for I do not know 
that the act of creation is impossible, — here we are, facing 
these two possiblities : one of them has no proof; the other 
has all the proof there is. Whether, then, it be demon- 
strated or not, every intelligent, every competent thinker 
must accept it at least as provisionally true. 

I wish now to note one further point. I said a moment 
ago that one of these theories was regarded as religious, and 
the other as only scientific. What is the explanation of this 
state of mind on the subject ? It is perfectly natural. We 
have inherited certain traditional religious ideas born out of 
the mental conditions of the world's childhood, accepted be- 
cause inherited, not proved, not capable of proof ; and among 
these ideas is this traditional account as to how the world, 
how animal and bird and man, came into being. It is purely 
traditional, then, and regarded with reverence and as sacred 
merely because it is associated with our religious ideas, part 
of our inheritance from the past; but, if God indeed be 
the life in all things that are, if the forces of this universe 
are the presence and activity of God, if what science calls 
the laws, the methods by which these forces work, are indeed 
the methods of God, then the only thing that deserves the 
name of religion would compel us to accept this which the 
higher, finer, more comprehensive intelligence of the modern 
world has discovered to be true. 

In dealing, then, with the methods by which life has 
evolved from its lowest forms to its highest, we are dealing 
with the present, active, working God. Do not think of it, 
then, as intellectual speculation merely. Do not think of it 
as science. It is the framework of the intelligent religion 
of to-day and of the future. 

Let us now raise the question as to what is the central 



The Method of Evolution 41 

thought of evolution, or Darwinism, as to what it means, a 
hint as to the method by which it works. You are familiar 
with its catchwords, — "natural selection," "the struggle for 
life," " the survival of the fittest." It is what these mean 
that I propose now to make as clear to you as I can in a 
few words. There are two forces, two tendencies at work. 
There is the tendency, as life is propagated generation after 
generation, to repeat the parental forms, whether of plant or 
animal or man. This is called the " law of heredity." There 
is along with this observable a tendency to vary, to branch 
out this way and that, and to develop some peculiarity, some 
new type or some new form ; and this the scientific men talk 
about as the " tendency to variation." 

Now, we need to note the fact that the forms of life, in- 
stead of being, as men used to suppose, hard and fast and 
fixed, are really elastic, — capable of being changed, capable 
of being wrought upon, not only by the force that is within 
while blossoming out this way and that, but of being shaped 
by environing forces, by the power of circumstances. In 
regard to plants and animals, they are subject to changes 
wrought by climate, by soil, by food, — by a hundred differ- 
ent forces that environ their life and make up the condition 
in the midst of which they pursue their career. Now come 
in the meaning and power of the principle of the struggle 
for life that is everywhere going on. Men recognize it in 
their business ; political parties recognize it in their conflicts 
for supremacy. We notice it in the affairs of human life 
and its relationships ; but we do not comprehend the tre- 
mendous significance and power of it as manifested through- 
out the entire field of the world's life. Consider, for exam- 
ple, a field of grasses in the spring,— thousands, millions, 
perhaps, of seeds are sown, more than there is room for, 
more than there is soil for, more than there is dew and rain 



42 Life 

and sunshine for, more than there is food for in the air and 
in the soil. What is the result ? All these seeds try to 
grow; and there ensues a struggle as real, if not as san- 
guine, as ever was seen on a human battle-field, — a struggle 
on the part of those millions of seeds for foothold, for light, 
for air, for food, — for life. Only a very small part of them 
can live. Which will live ? Why, of course, those best 
adapted to the soil, those that get the first start, those 
which are best situated, those that, for one of a thousand 
reasons, have the advantage as to all those conditions on 
which the life of a single blade of grass depends. Thus it 
will be the fittest that will survive. 

But right here let me take occasion, before I go any fur- 
ther, to define that term, the survival of the fittest; for I 
suppose there is no catchword of modern science that is 
more misunderstood and misinterpreted than that. Some of 
the leading thinkers and speakers of the world show them- 
selves children, incompetent, uneducated, the minute they 
attempt to touch or deal with this phrase. Some years ago, 
for example, I remember that Mr. Talmage adduced, as an 
illustration of what he supposed to be the fact, that the law 
of the survival of the fittest did not hold in the assassination 
of President Garfield. He said, " Here a man like Garfield 
dies, and a man like Guiteau is able to put him to death, 
and continues to live. Is that the survival of the fittest ? " 
And he appeared to think that he had demolished all of 
modern science by merely asking that question. He simply 
showed his own lack of intelligence as to what the real law 
of the survival of the fittest meant. It does not at all mean, 
in the first instance, it has no sort of relationship to, any 
question as to whether it is the fittest morally, — that is, the 
morally best, — whether it is the good always that survives. 
That has nothing to do with it in the first instance. In the 



The Method of Evolution 43 

case of a blade of grass, it is that which is best adapted to 
its conditions, best adapted to its circumstances, that lives. 
That is all it means. In the case of a herd of antelope 
that is being pursued by some enemy, it is the one that is 
best fitted to escape that survives, and the others perish. 
So, in any great struggle in any part of the wide world that 
is going on, the fittest, in the scientific use of that term, are 
those that are best adapted to exist in the given set of cir- 
cumstances. It has nothing whatever to do with the ques- 
tion as to whether they are good or bad or indifferent : it is 
simply that they are fitted to survive where they are, and 
the others are not. That is all. As to whether, however, 
the world over and the ages through, it is the morally best 
fitted that survive is another question, and one with which 
we shall deal before our course is finished. But here is 
what the law means : in every department of life, in every 
kingdom of being over the wide world, there is this struggle 
for existence going on ; there is the dying out and being 
left behind of those that for one reason or another cannot 
keep up; there is the survival of those best adapted to 
the conditions which surround them. This is the central 
thought of evolution, of Darwinism. 

I ask you now to consider it with me a little while, not as 
to whether it is good or bad, not as to whether it is moral 
or immoral or unmoral, not as to whether it is tender or 
cruel, but simply to note some of the effects in the different 
departments of life, and see what are the actual results of 
this struggle that is going on. It is absolutely universal so 
far as the intelligence of man can reach. Perhaps you are 
not aware of the marvellous work that is going on to-day in 
the fields of astronomy over our heads. The process of the 
growth of solar systems is not only taking place, we not only 
feel sure that that which has been going on here must be 



44 Life 

going on somewhere else, but we are able to study to-day the 
growth of solar systems in the deeps of space, by means 
of the telescope and of the spectroscope, — for the tele- 
scope alone would not be enough : we are able to see aggre- 
gations of matter which by and by are going to be suns and 
worlds and moons, complete systems like that which is our 
home ; and this process that I speak of now — the struggle 
for life and the survival of the fittest — is going on there just 
the same as here. That aggregation which happens to-day 
to be the larger, which has the stronger attractive pull, 
which has the advantage of situation over the other masses, 
draws all these to itself until it becomes the nucleus of a 
system and the nucleus of a sun that is to light and warm 
and develop future forms of life on the different members 
of that system. Then, when we come to our old planet, our 
world, when it has sufficiently cooled so that the first forms 
of life can be developed on it, then that marvellous prodigal- 
ity that pours out infinite, countless forms of life in every 
direction continues its gigantic work. Thousands and thou- 
sands, millions on millions more forms of life than continue 
to live are developed on every hand. Just as one tiny illus- 
tration : There are certain species of flies that produce so 
rapidly that, in the course of three months, if none of them 
were destroyed, there would be hundreds of millions of 
millions produced by one single pair. And yet the num- 
ber relatively does not increase from year to year, — perhaps 
it might diminish in the case of any particular species. This 
hints to you the enormous struggle for life and the enormous 
slaughter that is going on, and how out of this struggle the 
few fittest only survive. You are aware of the fact that there 
are certain kinds of fishes in the sea that, if they should 
propagate unhindered and none of their progeny be de- 
stroyed, would in time fill the basin of the ocean itself, and 



The Method of Evolution 45 

that in only a very few years, if such a thing were possible. 
And so in every direction is this display of an almost incon- 
ceivable prodigality ; and thus the struggle goes on. 

Now, let us see some of the results. Go to the grass-field 
I spoke of a moment ago. What particular kinds of grass 
will develop, come to the front, and succeed in this battle ? 
Why, of course, the strongest, the finest, the best specimens. 
What is the result of that ? Would it be better if there were 
some power to interfere, so that the poorest specimens lived 
and the best died ? Would that be an improvement on 
the present method ? In the grass-fields, at any rate, it is 
better that this power should work on unhindered just as it 
is working to-day. 

Let us come into the realms of flowers. You enjoy the 
beautiful tint of a rose, the fragrance of a pink or a lily. 
Do you ever stop to think that this fragrance, this exquisite 
tinting, is the result of relentless and age-long battle on the 
part of flowers, — a battle as fierce as was ever Thermopylae 
or Waterloo ? Many of the flowers are fertilized by insects. 
Insects have a taste not only as to food, but perfume and 
color. They choose instinctively, and select the fairest, 
finest specimens ; and so, day after day, beautiful color and 
exquisite odors are developed for the delight of our senses, 
by agencies blindly at work, so far as any consciousness of 
our care for the results are concerned. And now would it 
be better if there were an interference, so that the homeli- 
est flowers and those with the least attractive scent were pre- 
served, and the most beautiful, the most exquisite ones were 
destroyed ? No, friends, whatever we may say about natural 
selection, the struggle for life and the survival of the fittest 
in any other department, we will let it woik on still among 
the flowers. 

Let us come up to the animal world. I spoke a moment 



46 Life 

ago, by way of illustration, of a herd of antelope. Do you 
not see how necessarily all the fine, beautiful, fleet, graceful 
characteristics of the antelope can be the result of this 
struggle for life and the survival of the fittest ? They all are 
pursued by some kind of animals that hunt them, for their 
prey ; and the one that is naturally the fleetest has the ad- 
vantage and escapes. This one of course propagates and 
becomes the parent of a race that tend to be like itself de- 
veloped and intensified, with its own peculiarities and char- 
acteristics ; and so from age to age, as the result of this 
struggle, of this survival of the fittest, the fleetest and most 
beautiful and most graceful are the outcome. It is better to 
leave it as it is, so far as these animals are concerned. 

Consider the case in regard to the birds. As the result of 
this age-long struggle, beauty of plumage and finest quality 
of song are the natural, the necessary outcome. I cannot go 
into the detail here this morning for lack of time ; but it 
would be easy to show you that every admirable quality, — 
those that delight and please us on the part of the birds of 
the air that make music at our windows in the morning, — 
that these are the results of this inevitable struggle for life 
and the survival of those that are fittest. In this case, it 
means those that are fittest according to our taste, you will 
see ; and yet, scientifically speaking, it means the survival 
only of those that are best adapted to survive in the midst of 
the conditions where they carry on their conflict. 

And, when we come to other animals, it is precisely the 
same there. In the whole wide world, as the creatures roam 
over the earth, this battle is going on ; and it is the finest 
and strongest, the best specimens, that survive and that 
propagate their kind to people the world, and it is the poor- 
est, the weakest, the feeblest, that are left behind. And here, 
again, would it be better if there were some interference with 



The Method of Evolution 47 

this law, so that all the strong and the beautiful should die, 
and only the diseased and deformed, the poorest specimens, 
should survive ? 

Now I wish to note, — I touched on this before, but I need 
to touch on it again, to make clear to you the grand sweep of 
this power up the ages, — I wish to note the three great 
stages in the evolution of life on this planet, so that you may 
see what this struggle really comes to. I am not talking 
now, you will understand, for the sake of its ethical effect at 
all. I am keeping myself to the severe, hard line of facts. 
There were ages during which the mightiest power on this 
globe was the power of brute force, when muscle was king, 
when might was right, — not only seemed right, but it was. 
Why not ? At any stage in the history of the world when 
the grandest thing on the planet is muscle, why should not 
muscle be king? And it lasted for ages. Then the force of 
evolution does — what? Exalts brain, develops intelligence; 
first, perhaps, in the lower form of cunning, or ability to out- 
wit an enemy, to get an advantage of some one not quite so 
quick or shrewd; but at last reaching up into the higher 
realms of intelligence until brain became king. Muscle, 
the might of the world, knelt at the foot of the throne on 
which intelligence sat and held its sceptre. Man, — just 
notice what it means, — man, particularly in his infancy, the 
weakest, feeblest of almost all creatures that are born on the 
earth; and yet simply by the power of this intangible thought 
that has its seat in the brain, — though all the mighty king- 
doms beneath might annihilate him in a week if only they 
were intelligent enough to know their power, — he rules all. 

But there is something in this world not only better, there 
is something mightier than brain ; for I do not wish you to 
think that I am losing sight of my principle, and bringing 
now an illustration of something to the front because it is 



48 Life 

better than brain. I am keeping myself to the hard and 
fast line of reality. What came and dethroned intelligence ? 
The moral ideal. To-day, conscience is mightier not only 
than brute force ; it is mightier than intelligence. Shrewd 
cunning, intelligence, as well as muscle, — these now kneel 
at the foot of the throne on which sits the moral ideal 
of the world, wielding its sceptre. Take one illustration : 
Five hundred years ago it would have been simply impossible 
for us to have won in our great Civil War between the North 
and South. For what turned the balance ? Not the strength 
of our armies so much, though, if the world would only con- 
sent to let us alone, we were the stronger. But, had it not 
been for the moral idea and its supremacy, reigning over the 
muscles and brains of England, there would have been in- 
terference that would have decided the conflict against 
us. It was the moral sense of England that fought against 
its prejudices, against its monarchical system, against its 
shrewdness in the money market, — the moral idea that 
made that far-off nation suffer for the sake of seeing the 
throned right of man come to the front, and win in that 
great struggle. So it was this moral ideal that was mightier 
than generals, mightier than cannon, in that war, and to-day. 
Another striking and startling illustration, if you realize its 
significance. There is one frail-looking, quiet gentleman liv- 
ing in this country, who is writing a series of articles about 
Russia and Siberia. And he, to-day, if prophecy is worth 
anything, is wielding a power that may have more to do with 
the future destinies of Russia than all the armies of the Czar. 
Why? 

Simply because he is speaking the truth, — the truth of 
humanity, of human rights, — and appealing to the moral 
ideal of the world against the barbarism of the Middle Ages. 
And that barbarism must go down just as truly as did the 



The Method of Evolution 49 

feeble walls of Jericho before the Hebrews' breath that was 
blown into their rams' horns. So the breath of this one 
man, voicing the moral ideal of the world, threatens to 
change the external structure and policy of an empire. As 
a matter of fact, — and this is the only point I care to empha- 
size, — the moral ideal in the free and open conflict of the 
world has shown itself not only the best, but the mightiest, 
so that in the struggle for life, and under the natural working 
of the law of the survival of the fittest, the conscience of man 
is at the front, and is to shape and rule the future. The 
great questions of the world that are to come up in the future 
are not to be settled by the whim of kings or the passions of 
legislators, not by cunning, not by swords, but by intelligence, 
dominated and guided by the moral ideal. Would it have 
been well in this great, world-wide struggle to have inter- 
fered with the working of this law? Could you have pro- 
duced any grander, any better outcome ? 

I must hasten now, and crowd what might take me an 
hour into ten minutes, simply hinting the working of this 
law in some other departments of life. Take it in the case 
of the world's art. What has it done there ? Beginning with 
the crudest attempts to imitate the shape of the human body 
either in marble or its apparent shape on some level surface, 
the world's art has grown \ and, in the free competition of 
the world, you have the highest ideals and forms of beauty 
that have been developed, and it is the poor that goes down 
inevitably. It might have a transient popularity, according 
to the false and passing judgments of a particular day ; but 
time tries all things, and sets its stamp at last only on that 
which is worthy of the highest approval. 

Precisely the same thing is true in music. Out of the 
crudest sounds of the world there have gradually been devel- 
oped, in the midst of this free, fearless, relentless competition. 



50 Life 

all the musical instruments and all the mighty works of musi- 
cal composition that we have yet attained ; and the highest, 
the finest, the grandest, the best, have beaten in the struggle 
every time. Would you have it otherwise ? Take it in the 
field of literature. Men try to write, to express their thoughts 
either in prose or verse. And this goes on age after age. 
Nobody but is free to try his hand at it. If he can give ex- 
pression to something that goes down deep enough or lifts 
high enough to touch and hold a world-wide interest, he has 
created a work that shall live. If not, no help of friends can 
bolster up the products of his pen. They are doomed to 
decay. Mr. Pope hurled his thunders at the little army of 
dunces that surrounded him and snapped and snarled at his 
heels ; but he might have saved himself the trouble. All he 
had to do was to go on creating something that England 
wished to preserve, and literature preserved it; and that 
which is not worth keeping, whether or not he condemns it, 
is thrown one side and left behind. 

And so in industrial affairs, in spite of all the lamenta- 
tions in regard to our condition and tendencies in the modern 
world, it is that which is best so far in the history of man 
which has come to the front. Among the millions of inven- 
tions, which live ? Those that do the work in the best and 
quickest and cheapest manner; that is, which serve the 
world the best. The others are forgotten. The industrial 
systems of the world are under the same law. First there 
were slaves who did the work ; next there were serfs ; then 
the feudal system came, and servants were tied to their lord 
and to the land on which they happened to be born. At 
last has come our wage system, — a system nominally, at any 
rate, of free competition, in which the laborer is at liberty to 
work for whom he will and where he will, so far as he has 
the strength to carry out his wishes. Whether or not there 



The Method of Evolution 51 

is anything better ahead of us, certainly, there is nothing 
better behind. As the result of the struggle so far in the 
history of man, that is the best that has come to the front, 
and is reigning over the destinies of the peoples to-day. 

Take it, again, in regard to the matter of politics and 
methods of government. I wish to show you how universal 
this is. Naturally, at first, the most muscular tribe would 
come to the front, and the man who was strongest would be 
leader. Would it be better to have weak men for leaders ? 
It would mean annihilation for the tribe inevitably. Self- 
interest is best for the life of him and his people under those 
circumstances ; and they do that which, under the condi- 
tions, under the circumstances, is always best. Then con- 
sider all the changes that the world has seen from the days 
of the tribal chief until the development of modern democ- 
racy. The same law has held and the same force has been 
at work. People said, when our war started, "You know 
that a democracy might prosper in time of peace, but it is 
not strong enough for war " ; and " People would die 
through loyalty to a man or woman, king or queen, through 
loyalty to a throne, but not for a flag or a cold, abstract 
principle." But we gathered the largest armies that the 
world has ever seen, and fought the grandest battles of all 
the world in the interest of these same ideas and the old 
flag that stood for them. So that, out of the struggles be- 
tween the different types of government, democracy has 
come to the front to-day, not because it is morally best, — 
because it is strongest. It satisfies the thought and the 
ideal as to largest opportunity of developing an intelligent 
people, and so wins an allegiance that no other type of 
government can equal. 

And now, at last, one more illustration. Precisely the 
same is true in religion. We have no right to find fault with 



52 Life 

the fact that there have been one hundred or one thousand 
religions in the world, and that they continue still. Relig- 
ions spring out of the mental, moral, and spiritual condition 
of the people at the time, and are necessary to represent and 
feed the wants of that particular age. If they did not, they 
would die like leaves in the fall. Religions continue to-day 
because they meet and match the intelligence and moral 
ideals, the conditions, dreams, and hopes of most of the peo- 
ple ; and you cannot expect the highest, the noblest, and 
purest type of religion to be sought after by crude, animal, 
undeveloped, ignorant men and women. The Catholic 
Church, for example, will rule over its thousands and mill- 
ions in the world just so long as the people have not out- 
grown it, so long as it feeds, helps, comforts, and stimulates 
people in the proper state of mind to be thus appealed to 
and helped ; and the higher, finer, truer types of religious 
life are naturally and necessarily held by the few who are the 
leaders. But these few represent the future ; and they must 
stand for and work for the coming ; but it is free, or ought 
to be, and world-wide competition. Let people find that 
which feeds, helps, comforts, uplifts them, — though not 
somebody else. Seek that which is true, that which is real, 
true to the reality of the nature of God, the laws of his 
universe, the nature of man. That which is true must win 
and dominate just so fast as men become wise enough to 
see and feel and hunger after the truth. The truth is real ; 
and, just as men come into accord with the truth, — i.e., 
come into accord with the Almighty, — just so fast and so 
far will they become strong like those that wield the power 
almighty, and thus, in the conflicts with weaker, poorer, and 
less true ideas, they will win, while the others go to the wall. 
And note, friends, one thing always : wherever that which is 
true, wherever that which is good and best, wins, it wins not 



The Method of Evolution 53 

for the sake of the victor alone, but it wins in the interest 
and for the sake of all men everywhere ; for it is for uni- 
versal human interest that that which is true and right and 
best in every department of life and thought should win. 

I have been discussing, friends, you have discovered, 
nothing less than that law against which so much is said 
in the modern world particularly, and as to its bearing on 
industrial affairs, — the law of free competition. I can carry 
the discussion no further. I simply note the fact that this, 
— whether we like it or not, — this apparently is God's 
method. At any rate, it has been his method for the 
countless millions of years in all the past. Whether he is 
about to reverse his method and adopt a new one is for 
some one wiser than I to say. This is his method, at any 
rate, up to the present hour; and next Sunday morning I 
shall raise the question as to the ethical significance of it. 
There is no time to touch it to-day. 



THE PROBLEM OF PAIN. 



Last Sunday we considered, waiving the moral bearing 
of the fact, simply the fact that, whether we like it or not, 
the method of evolution, of growth, of the lifting and the 
advance of all the forms of life on this planet, involves a 
world-wide warfare, a struggle for life, — the slaughter of 
countless numbers that fail in this struggle, and so the sur- 
vival only of the fittest. 

I am to ask you to consider with me this morning, for a 
little while, whether this method is consistent with the sup- 
posed wisdom, goodness, and love of the power that is 
responsible for it. It is charged on every hand that it is 
inconsistent. Newspapers, reviews, lecture platforms, repeat 
to us over and over again the statement that, in the light of 
modern knowledge, and from the point of view of modern 
science, it is impossible for man to believe in the good- 
ness and the mercy of God. 

This is made the point of attack on the part of those that 
seek to prove to us that religion is only a superstition, that 
it is to be antiquated and outgrown. It is the cause, on the 
part of those who wish to believe in it, of no end of heart- 
ache and of brain perplexity; and many, who instinctively 
cling still to their faith, are yet so troubled by these objec- 
tions that they hardly dare face them, saying to those who 
press them, " We cannot answer you ; but we must still 
believe, in order that we may live." 



The Problem of Pain 55 

This is, friends, one of the largest and most important 
themes that I shall consider in this series of sermons ; and I 
shall ask your patience for whatever time is necessary, that 
I may treat it adequately and fairly. I shall condense, how- 
ever, and be as brief as possible. 

I wish here, on the threshold, — because I do not know 
where else the problem is so fully stated, — to read to you 
words very familiar, I know, from Lord Tennyson's " In 
Memoriam " : — 

" Oh, yet we trust that somehow good 
Will be the final goal of ill, 
To pangs of nature, sins of will, 
Defects of doubt, and taints of blood ; 

" That nothing walks with aimless feet ; 
That not one life shall be destroyed, 
Or cast as rubbish to the void, 
When God hath made the pile complete ; 

" That not a worm is cloven in vain ; 
That not a moth with vain desire 
Is shrivelled in a fruitless fire, 
Or but subserves another's gain. 

" Behold, we know not anything ; 
I can but trust that good shall fall 
At last,— far off,— at last, to all, 
And every winter change to spring. 



" Are God and Nature then at strife, 
That Nature lends such evil dreams ? 
So careful of the type she seems, 
So careless of the single life ; 

" That I, considering everywhere 
Her secret meaning in her deeds, 
And finding that of fifty seeds 
She often brings but one to bear, 



56 Life 



" I falter where I firmly trod, 

And falling with my weight of cares 

Upon the great world's altar-stairs 

That slope through darkness up to God, 

" I stretch lame hands of faith, and grope, 
And gather dust and chaff, and call 
To what I feel is Lord of all, 
And faintly trust the larger hope. 



" ' So careful of the type ? ' but no ; 

From scarped cliff and quarried stone 
She cries, ' A thousand types are gone : 
I care for nothing, all shall go. 

" ' Thou makest thine appeal to me : 
I bring to life, I bring to death : 
The spirit does but mean the breath : 
I know no more.' And he, shall he, 

"Man, her last work, who seemed so fair, 
Such splendid purpose in his eyes, 
Who rolled the psalm to wintry skies, 
Who built him fanes of fruitless prayer, 

" Who trusted God was love indeed, 
And love Creation's final law, — 
Though Nature, red in tooth and claw 
With ravin, shrieked against his creed, — 

" Who loved, who suffered countless ills, 
Who battled for the True, the Just, 
Be blown about the desert dust, 
Or sealed within the iron hills ? 

" No more ? A monster then, a dream, 
A discord. Dragons of the prime, 
That tare each other in their slime, 
Were mellow music matched with him." 

Here is the problem with which we are to deal this morn- 
ing. Grant the facts, every one of them, — grant more than 



The Problem of Pain 57 

you can understand or picture by the force of imagination. 
Then — what ? 

I wish to divide my answer this morning, and ask you to 
consider with me, first, the problem of pain, of suffering, of 
death, as related to the lower orders of life beneath man. 
This first : man afterwards. 

I. (1) Consider, then, at the outset, this. So far as I can 
understand, it is merely the question, at the start, as to 
whether there shall be life or not. For life — conscious, 
sensitive life — carries with it of necessity the possibility of 
some pain. Anything that can feel, can feel that which is 
disagreeable as well as that which is pleasant. So that it is 
a question, as I said, as to whether any conscious, sentient 
life shall exist. As between the two, I, for one, — I will not 
stop now to give you my reasons : they will develop as we go 
on, — I, for one, as between life with some pain, and no life, 
with neither pain nor pleasure, choose life. 

(2) We have taken that step, then j grant the existence of 
life, and with it the possibility of suffering. Next, let us 
raise the question that seems to me very relevant indeed, 
but which, so far as I observe the discussions on the subject, 
is almost never raised at all, — as to whether any particular 
individual among all the lower forms of life has any claim 
as against the universe for something it has not received. 

Here is no life at all : some power, by some process, no 
matter what, proposes to bring an individual — let it be a 
fish or a reptile or a bird or a mammal — into being. Now, 
at the outset, has this particular creatune any claim on the 
universe for any special length of life, «for any particular 
amount of satisfaction, for any quantity of happiness ? It 
seems to me, if we waive all sentimental considerations and 
treat it as a mere matter of justice, we shall be obliged to 
say that whatever is given is an outright beneficence, not on 



58 Life 

the basis of claim at all, and that the creature which is 
receiving has no right to appeal to any court, real or imag- 
inary, as against this power because more has not been 
given. 

(3) Take now the third step. The considerations that I 
am about to adduce now will reflect backward over those 
that have already been stated, — will color them, modify 
them, will justify them. In old times, — because they, I 
suppose, had not developed a very large amount of sensitive- 
ness themselves as compared with that which exists to-day, 
— men were at least thoughtless, in many cases positively 
cruel, perhaps almost always selfish, in their dealings with 
the lower forms of life. And yet, friends, I believe that, if 
we face this question frankly and try to find out precisely 
what are the facts, we shall be obliged to confess that, 
springing out of the sensitiveness, the tenderness, the love of 
the modern world, there has come an enormous exaggeration 
of our thought and feeling as to the real amount of pain suf- 
fered by the lower forms of life. I believe this exaggeration 
is so great as to amount to positive distortion, and that, 
purely as a fiction of our own fancies, we build up that which 
does not exist, and then charge it against the Creator as an 
indictment of his goodness. 

Mark one thing, friends. Do me no injustice here. I 
would not have what I am saying to-day perverted into a 
plea for thoughtlessness, for selfishness, for cruelty towards 
any form of life that lives. Wanton, causeless infliction of 
pain on anything that can feel is, to my mind, unmanly. 
And, when I find a man, true and noble and honorable in all 
other departments of life, capable of it, I know it is only 
thoughtlessness with him, and not purpose. 

But let us consider a few facts. Where is the seat of sen- 
sation ? Modern science has revealed it to us clearly 



The Problem of Pain 59 

enough : it is in a certain definite section of the brain, so 
far as man is concerned. I am referring to man now, not 
because I have forgotten that I am dealing with the lower 
world, but merely by way of illustration. It is situated in a 
certain definite part of the brain, and is connected with the 
nervous system. If a surgeon could uncover some other 
part of the brain except this one, he might cut it with his 
knife ad libitum, and you might be entirely unconscious of 
the fact that he was at work. There would be no pain 
connected with it. The lower forms of life have only the 
most elementary nervous systems, and no brain in the true 
sense of the word at all, — only certain little knots in the 
nerve cords that are called "ganglia," which are, so to 
speak, incipient brains. The lower forms of life, then, do 
not possess anything like the quantity of sensation with 
which we, standing up here and looking down upon them, 
imaginatively endow them. They have neither the capac- 
ity for pleasure nor the capacity for pain that we dream of 
as possible on their part. 

Let me give you one or two typical illustrations. The 
horse is one of the most highly developed animals below 
man. And yet cases are on record similar to this, — of a 
horse with his leg broken, broken short off, turned into a 
pasture, walking about on this broken and bleeding stump, 
and comfortably eating the grass that was within his reach, 
as though nothing had happened. This is enough to show 
that on the part of the horse there simply cannot be any- 
thing like the sensitiveness to pain that you would find on 
the part of man. 

When you consider that there are certain types of life, 
certain worms, for example, which can be cut right in two, 
and when you consider that these two parts, instead of dying 
or appearing to suffer any inconvenience, proceed to manu- 



60 Life 

facture for themselves the part which is lost, so that there 
are two whole worms instead of one, you cannot think that 
there was any great amount of pain or any great disaster 
suffered in the process of its being cut in two. And when 
you know that certain lobsters and crabs, even as highly 
organized as they are, when frightened, will even fling off 
certain parts of themselves, certain whole limbs, members, 
— as though a man, for example, should fling an arm off, — 
and then that they proceed in a very short time to grow new 
ones, you know that there can be no such suffering as there 
would be in the case of a man under such circumstances. 

And when a beetle has been secured in the case of a 
naturalist with a pin driven through his body, but in some 
way has managed to get free from his bonds, to loosen the 
pin, and when you see him walking around in his case and 
devouring with a good appetite all the other kinds of 
creatures with which he can come in contact, making a 
very happy dinner with the pin still through him, you must 
understand that the beetle is not suffering any such amount 
of pain as we frequently give the lower world credit for be- 
ing able to suffer. 

These simply as illustrations of the fact that where there 
is no highly organized, complex, developed nervous system, 
there can be no such pain as there is in the case of those 
where the nervous system and the brain are highly developed 
and complex. 

(4) Then note one other thing: that pain, in almost all 
cases in regard to the lower world, and the higher, too, is 
merely preventive, guardian ; that it stands on the border 
line of what it is not safe to transgress, warning people not 
to step over. You see that the beneficence even of pain 
may begin to become apparent. Almost all the pain that a 
person suffers in a surgical operation is pain at the surface. 



The Problem of Pain 61 

If a surgeon could get at the organs within the body or the 
muscles within the body without inflicting any wound on the 
surface, there are many of them that might be carved and 
cut at his leisure without any conscious inconvenience in 
the way of pain on the part of his subject. 

There is, then, no such amount of pain in the lower world 
as we are accustomed to imagine. And so the indictment 
against the goodness of God that is brought concerning the 
relations of the lower animals to each other falls for want of 
proof, simply goes by default. The supposed facts on which 
it is based do not exist. 

(5) Then again, if animals are going to die, it is prob- 
ably true that, in spite of Tennyson's graphic picture of 
dragons tearing each other in their slime, and of 

" Nature, red in tooth and claw 
With ravin," — 

in spite of all these, it is probably true that there is less 
pain connected with the common method of mutual pursuit 
and devouring of each other than there would be with these 
elements left out. If a thing is to live at all, then it must 
either keep on living forever or it must die. And, if it is to 
leave the world, there must be some doorway by which it is 
to go out. What would be left if the lower forms of life 
were not destroyed as they are now ? What would be the 
next alternative ? It would be growing old, getting infirm, 
losing the ability after a while to provide themselves with 
food, and then, perhaps, perishing by lingering starvation. 
Would that be more merciful ? 

(6) Then we need to consider another fact, which is not a 
guess or speculation, but which has been fairly demonstrated. 
It is probably true that the creatures which die as the result 
of being preyed upon by other creatures suffer in the process 



62 Life 

almost no pain at all. I have told you how absurd it is to 
suppose they would suffer as much as a man under similar 
circumstances. And then, furthermore, it is undoubtedly true 
— in many cases, at any rate — that the mere fact, after pro- 
longed and useless flight, that the creature is caught, produces 
a sort of numbness or stupefaction, so that it is not conscious 
of pain. At any rate, we know that this is true in some 
cases even concerning so highly and sensitively organized 
a creature as man. Dr. Livingstone has given us a most 
graphic picture of his own experience when one day he was 
caught by a lion. The lion suddenly sprang upon him ; and 
he says from the moment the lion's paw struck him and he 
fell, though perfectly conscious that he was in the lion's 
power, that this king of the forest was bending over him, 
and that he contemplated the possibility, the almost cer- 
tainty, of being devoured within a few moments, there was 
absolutely no fear and no pain. The nervous system, as the 
result of the shock of being caught thus, seemed to have 
suspended its operations so far as pain was concerned. And 
if Livingstone had at that moment been torn limb from limb 
instead of living to tell us about it, while we should have 
pictured the horrors of dying thus, he would have actually 
suffered no horror at all. It is probably true, I say, that 
what is true in the case of so highly organized and sensitive 
a creature as man is even more true in the case of the lower 
orders of life. 

(7) Remember also that the lower forms of life beneath 
man have no dread of death, — they do not know what 
death means, are never found thinking about it or troubling 
themselves over it. We suffer more, as you know, with the 
thought of death, a million times over, than we ever do in 
dying. They are spared all this. They have no superstitious 
terrors as to any horrors that may follow the act of dying. 



The Problem of Pain 63 

They are spared all this. And then, in a general way, note 
that almost all the things that constitute the great mass of 
human suffering all the lower world is spared. The anxieties 
about to-morrow, the social rivalries, the broken ideals, the 
defeated ambitions, — they suffer none of these things. 

(8) One other consideration only will I offer as bearing on 
this phase of the problem. The question might be asked, 
" Why did not the Creator, or whoever planned this present 
condition of things, create just enough creatures to fairly 
people the earth, and then let them live on indefinitely, 
none of them dying ? " 

That is a perfectly fair question. But, to my mind, this 
would not have resulted in a tithe, a thousandth part, even, of 
the pleasures on the part of the lower world that are produced 
by the present system. Which would confer most pleasure, 
having a thousand men sit at a good dinner, for an hour 
apiece, or having one man sit at the same dinner for a thou- 
sand hours ? Which results in the larger amount of creature 
comfort, to have countless millions on millions on millions of 
tiny creatures live their little lives — lives relatively long as 
ours — in the air of a summer day, and then suddenly go out 
like a snuffed candle, and as painlessly, probably, as the can- 
dle does, or have just a few alive and continue on indefinitely, 
year after year ? The present process seems to me perfectly 
parallel to the illustration I have used. It gives millions of 
creatures an opportunity to sit at the feast of life, to taste its 
sweets, instead of only a few continuing it for an indefinite 
period of time. 

I believe, then, that the present system, in spite of all that 
anybody can say against it, is productive of infinitely more 
pleasure than the opposite. And if we look at things, not 
through the eyes of an inflamed and irritated sentimentality, 
but through the eyes of a clear, calm reason that seeks for 



64 Life 

facts, I believe we are justified in looking out over the animal 
world and thinking of its countless noises only as songs of 
joy, — one glad, bright, sunny scene from North to South, 
from East to West, and round the globe ; and all this diseased 
picturing of it as monsters tearing each other, and as every- 
thing being red with ravin, seems to me no more sane than 
the imaginations of a man who is suffering from delirium 
tremens. It is not true. And so, when people ask me how 
I am going to get rid of this great problem of world-wide 
suffering beneath man, I do not believe that, as compared 
with the amount of joy involved in their living, there is any 
problem there to be done away with. The pain, the suffering, 
is as nothing, — no more than are the shadows compared with 
the flood of sunlight that illumines space. I believe, then, 
that we may talk about nature as sending up one age-long 
and world-wide hymn of gladness and of praise. 

II. I come now to my second point, the other half of the 
problem, — as it pertains to man. I shall need to repeat one 
or two points here and so get over them more briefly. 

(i) As between existence and non-existence, as in the 
case of the animal, it is the question whether we shall have 
life coupled with the possibility of pain, or no life at all. I 
have not been free from pain ; I have had my share of pov- 
erty, of struggle, of disappointment, of broken ideals, of 
heartache ; and yet I have seen some sacred, blessed minutes 
that have paid me for a year of pain. And I, for one, can 
look God in the face and bless him for his gift of life in spite 
of all its disabilities and sorrows. 

(2) I believe, then, in life. In the next place, let us ask 
about man the same question as we asked before about the 
animal. Do you know, I think that any quantity of our 
suiferings are useless, and the counts in our indictment are 
purely imaginary ? Answer yourself in the quiet of your own 



The Problem of Pain 65 

room ; sit down and be fair with yourself and with God ; ask 
as to whether you have not received in this life as much, at 
any rate, as you were entitled to. How much were you en- 
titled to ? Because God gave you life here, did he promise 
to make you millionaires ? Have you any right to claim to 
be millionaires ? Have you any right to charge God as 
being unjust because some other man is a millionaire and you 
are not? He has given you a certain amount of intelligence, 
a certain quantity and power of brain. Have you any right 
to sit down and whine because he did not make a Shakspere 
of you ? He has given you a passable quantity of good looks. 
Have you any right to find fault with him because he did 
not make you Venuses or Apollo Belvideres ? Had you any 
claim on the universe, at the hour of your birth, for any par- 
ticular amount of happiness ? If you had, where did you get 
it ? A little more modesty on our part, a little more justice, 
a little more carefulness of thought, will take away a large 
part of the difficulty that we try, and, as we think, vainly try 
to explain. If you look upon the things you have that are 
worth having as gifts, and then remember that, of the thou- 
sand things you wish you had, perhaps you have not a just 
claim to a single one of them, that you have no right to 
charge God with injustice because he has not given them, 
perhaps it will abate a little of your fault-finding. 

(3) And then, in the third place, as in the case of the ani- 
mal, I believe that we enormously exaggerate the amount 
of human suffering as compared with the amount of human 
comfort. This is an age of super-sensitiveness on all these 
subjects. The grand and vigorous joy of life that you find 
ringing in the literature of the Greeks, in Chaucer, — who, 
by the way, did not live in nearly so good an age as we 
do and was not specially blessed in the ordinary affairs of 
life, — all these notes of joy have turned in the modern 



66 Life 

world into pessimistic whines and wails, and, nine times out 
of ten, for no rational cause whatsoever that I can discover. 
The world is infinitely better off than it was before \ men 
live longer, live more healthfully, their general wants are 
better supplied, than ever before since the world began. 
And yet the general majority of people, like a baby crying 
for the moon, are forgetting all the wealth of comforts that 
are about them, and complaining against the ordering of 
the universe because they have not everything of which they 
can dream. 

We look down, for example, to use an illustration, — I 
have to use terms, and they mean a good deal that I do not 
believe in, — look down upon the wage-workers of the 
world, — if it is down : from what I hear a good many mill- 
ionaires talking about, I think from their point of view it 
may very frequently be up, — but consider those people who 
are less well off than we are, those who work for two dollars 
or two dollars and a half a day, perhaps, while you are inde- 
pendent, making your own fortunes or having a salary that 
lifts you very much above that position. Now, I believe it 
is a very great mistake for us to suppose that all the happi- 
ness is up on the higher grade, and to look down, as some 
platform orator often does, upon the toiling millions, as he 
calls them, as if they were in the most distressful condition 
in all the world. 

Now, friends, I can speak from personal experience, — you 
will pardon my referring to it in that way. There are very 
few poor boys in Boston whose boyhood is poorer than mine 
was ; and I should think to-day that it was a calamity if I 
were obliged to take my boy and put him down there into 
the condition in which I was. And yet I was not conscious 
of being abused. My boyhood in Maine was a glad one, a 
happy one, in spite of the fact that I had almost none of the 



The Problem of Pain 67 

thousand things that children have to-day to contribute to 
their happiness, in spite of the fact that I suffered cold, in 
spite of the fact that my dinner was frequently a little more 
scanty than I would have desired. My boyhood was a 
happy boyhood. This whole thing is relative. Take a man 
who is living on five thousand dollars a year and give him 
four thousand dollars, and he is poor. Take a man who is 
living on five hundred dollars a year and give him six hun- 
dred dollars, and he is rich. 

And these people who are living thus on their wages 
are not such pitiable objects as enthusiastic philanthropists 
would have us imagine. Do not misunderstand me here, 
friends, as out of sympathy with these. I think I have 
proved my right to speak in this way by the fact that I have 
done, all my life long, everything I could to help the world 
on in every direction, to help men on and up. But it is a 
question now as to relative happiness ; and I do not believe 
that these men up here, who have made the money and at- 
tained to the high social and political positions, are relatively 
the ones that are getting the most in the way of comfort out 
of this world. 

It was not a great while ago that a railroad president told 
me, as a matter of confidence out of his own heart, that he 
looked with envy on the baggage-man at some station on his 
road, who had nothing to do but look after the affairs of 
every day and go home and do what he could not, — sleep 
quietly at night. And yet we have diseased our thoughts 
about this matter of what constitutes happiness until I sup- 
pose the baggage-master would have been eaten up with envy 
of the railroad president, who at the same moment was envy- 
ing him. 

The world is a great deal happier, friends, than we are ac- 
customed to think it. In the first place, if you will watch 



68 Life 

yourselves, you will notice your minds playing this kind of 
trick on you. You have a peaceful, happy life for days and 
weeks, and there is no event to mark it off, and you do not 
remember it any more than you remember a square yard of 
sunshine as you pass by or when looking at it out of doors. 
But something happens to make you suffer, and you remem- 
ber that a long time; and the shadow of that suffering 
spreads itself like a cloud, until it seems to blot out all the 
sunshine. It is said that happy nations have no history. 
The happy parts of our lives are not the ones that we record. 
We write down our sorrows : we do not stop to write out in 
detail the pleasant, comfortable hours that we enjoy. 

(4) Then I wish to note another point, which I touched 
on very briefly in treating of the animal world. From the 
point of view of God, or the universe, I believe that there 
is no causeless, no useless pain. Pain is always preventive, 
guardian, in its nature. It is like those signs that you see 
standing at the entrance of ways that are not passable, " Pri- 
vate way, dangerous passing." Pain always means a condi- 
tion of happy life broken, one of God's laws disregarded, 
whether it is a personal or a social law. It is simply a 
warning, " Do not pass that way again." When the time 
comes that there is no hope of life left in the body, so 
that there is no use in fighting for continued existence, then, 
almost always, the pain ceases. From the point of view of 
men, there is plenty of causeless, useless, wicked pain, grow- 
ing out of selfishness, growing out of thoughtlessness, grow- 
ing out of possibly intentional cruelty. But, from the point 
of view of God, of the universe, all pain simply marks dis- 
eased, imperfect conditions of things, and presses us on and 
up to escape them. I do not believe there is a thinker in 
the world who can point out a case of pain that does not fall 
under this definition. 



TJie Problem of Pain 69 

(5) I must hasten over this, however, though I might 
argue it much more at length to advantage, to touch my next 
point. Let us consider now, within the sphere of human 
life, this great struggle, this world-wide competition between 
nations, social groups, business houses, individual men and 
women, — one universal, age-long scene of effort to get ahead. 
I showed you last Sunday, I think quite plainly, that what- 
ever harm, whatever suffering, might come to individuals, on 
the whole and in the long run, the grandest results had been 
produced under the dominance of that method. I wish now 
to consider it a little more closely as to its moral bearing on 
the rights of individuals. 

As I said a moment ago, so far as I can understand it, no 
individual living has any just claim on the universe for any 
more beauty or any more brain power or any more muscular 
power or any more general intelligence than he possesses. 
When he talks about its being unjust because Mr. Vanderbilt 
is worth a hundred millions, and he can only earn his living, 
— unjust how? It may be that we have not attained the 
ideal order of society, that we have not attained as equal a 
distribution of these things as we might desire. It may be 
that Mr. Vanderbilt is not kind in the use of his money. 
But how have I any claim against God for a definite quantity 
of money? — that is what I never can understand, — or how 
is God unjust because he has not given me some more ? 

Consider now this struggle, this conflict, that is going on. 
Who is the happiest ? Who gets the most benefit out of the 
winning on the part of those who do win ? Are those men 
who succeed, as we say, in the struggle, the happiest ones ? 
Take Elias Howe, who conferred such a world-wide benefit 
in the invention of the sewing-machine, — did he get the 
greatest amount of happiness out of it ? Millions of people 
all over the earth to-day are getting more happiness out of it 



70 Life 

than he did. Take the case of Shakspere. Shakspere led 
a fairly comfortable life ; but, so far as we can find out, he 
was better satisfied with his business success than he was 
with his poems. Did Shakspere get more happiness out of 
his plays than the rest of people ? Again, millions of men 
have reaped more pleasure as the result of his successful 
competition with the playwrights of his time than ever he 
succeeded in attaining. 

Suppose there is a struggle between two inventors in any 
department of life, — only one can succeed : would it be better 
for the world to have a second-rate or third-rate or tenth-rate 
machine succeed ? Manifestly, it is better for the world to 
have the best succeed. It is better, too, for the unsuccessful 
competitors ; for they are a part of the world, and they and 
their children enter in and reap their share of the result of 
the attainment of the best. 

(6) And, then, there is another thing. Something comes 
out of this that people who talk about the injustice of com- 
petition seem to me to very little comprehend. Take the 
struggle of two inventors : one of them succeeds, and the 
other fails. It is better, I said, always that the best one 
should succeed. There would be just as much suffering 
between the two themselves if the poor one succeeded, and 
it would be a great deal worse for the world. It is better, as 
I say, that the best should succeed. But they who strive to 
attain certain definite objects, but do not quite succeed, — do 
they fail ? Is the struggle of no use ? A man enters a gym- 
nasium, and determines, if he can, to reach a certain standard 
of excellence as an athlete. He may not quite attain it ; but 
have his effort, his struggle, his training, been all thrown 
away? 

Let me read you here, as bearing on this point, — summing 
it up, — some simple lines of my own which I have read you 
before, entitled " Pursuit " : — 



The Problem of Pain yi 

My boyhood chased the butterfly, 

Or, when the shower was gone, 
Sought treasures at the rainbow's end 

That lured me, wandering, on. 
I caught nor bow nor butterfly, 

Though eagerly I ran, 
But in the chase I found myself, 

And grew to be a man. 

In later years I chased the good, 

The beautiful, the true ; 
Mirage-like forms which take not shape, 

They flit while I pursue. 
But, while the endless chase I run, 

I grow in life divine ; 
I miss th' ideal that I seek, 

But God himself is mine. 

People forget that out of just this struggle, whether it suc- 
ceeds in attaining this particular point or that, there comes 
soul-growth, culture, — the building up of manhood into the 
divine. And when we remember, friends, — and, mark you, 
I shall not attempt to substantiate it this morning ; for it lies 
upon those who doubt the age-long trust to prove its falsity, 
so far as this argument is concerned, — when we remember 
the age-long hope of an eternal career, out under the shadows 
there and beyond, and remember that in infinite time there 
is scope and range for the growth of every individual soul 
into all of which it is capable, then the problem has no 
longer any more meaning as an indictment against the good- 
ness or the wisdom of God. 

And it is better even for happiness that there should be 
infinite variety and diversity. Even over yonder shall we 
find fault because we are not all Saint Pauls, not all Saint 
Johns, not all Dantes, Goethes, Shaksperes, Homers ? Sup- 
pose you had a heaven crowded full of Shaksperes, just 
alike: it would not be a very interesting place. But have 



•} 7 2 Life 

it crowded full of human souls as diversified as the count- 
less forms of life, and out of the multiplicity there comes a 
wondrous harmony that means an eternal anthem of praise. 

Now, friends, just one word of suggested contrast. As 
compared with the old system of the universe, the old theory, 
this is a law of goodness and beauty and love. For, how- 
ever many failures there may be, however long delayed may 
be the success, we do not believe in any eternal failures. 
The old system gave us the hope that a few would come out 
ahead, and the rest, not pursuing and following, but cast 
as rubbish to the void, — no, no, no, not rubbish ; for rubbish 
feels not and suffers not, — cast as wrecked, distorted, 
tortured souls to the void. 

As compared with the old system, then, the difficulties of 
justifying the ways of God to man are as nothing in the 
light of the modern theory of evolution. It answers almost 
all the old objections, — provisionally, at any rate, — and 
gives us rational ground on which to stand. For, again, 
— let it come in like the same tone of music towards the 
close that it was at the beginning, — though there may be 
ever so much of ruin in the scheme of the old theory, — 

" Oh, yet we trust that somehow good 
Will be the final goal of ill, 
To pangs of nature, sins of will, 
Defects of doubt, and taints of blood ; 

" That nothing walks with aimless feet ; 
That not one life shall be destroyed, 
Or cast as rubbish to the void, 
When God hath made the pile complete." 



THE INDIVIDUAL SOUL UNDER LAW. 



At first sight there is an apparent serious loss in coming 
out of the old universe, leaving behind us our old thought 
about God, and coming to be mentally and sympathetically 
an inhabitant of the new one. If you stop to think a mo- 
ment, you will see how very reasonable, how necessary, per- 
haps, is this apparent loss. Only go back for a little while, 
— for the change, as I have told you, is very modern, — only 
go back for a little while, and how were we related, the 
individual soul as towards its God ? 

The old world was very small. The whole universe, 
instead of being boundless, as we think of it to-day, a limit- 
less waste of blue sprinkled with stars and stretchfng on 
until thought is weary in attempting to find a limit, — instead 
of this, it was a little cosey universe, so to speak, that we 
could easily grasp with our thought, in which we could easily 
find ourselves at home. Here was this little world, carpeted 
with green, with mountain pillars to support a sky not very 
far away, stars, sun, and moon only lights for the conven- 
ience of man ; just overhead a real celestial court, with God 
sitting there on a throne surrounded by his angels, hearing 
every call of any one of his children in distress, and, as 
represented in the old Scriptures, ready to send his angel 
down, who might come like a flash of light, standing by our 
elbow before we were through speaking, ready to take our 



74 Life 

prayers and carry them up to the throne of God, and to 
execute God's will concerning us. There seemed then to be 
this intimate personal relationship between the soul and 
God, and prayer meant asking for help, for comfort, for 
relief of a personal, visibly outlined God who would send 
help to us, if it was best; if not, perhaps would send an 
invisible angel down to whisper comfort and make us strong 
to bear. God seemed very near to us then, help seemed 
very accessible, prayer seemed very reasonable, so that 
to change from that to our present thought of things seems 
to the hearts of many to be like a desolation. Every change 
of this sort must wear such an aspect at the outset. 

You remember that naive story of Rachel, that I have had 
occasion sometimes to refer to, how, when she was leaving 
her father's house to go with her husband, she stole her 
father's gods — the teraphim, as they were called, tiny, port- 
able images — and hid them in her camel's furniture, and 
sat upon them, thinking that in this way she was carrying 
these divine presences and powers and helps with her, so that 
they might be at her side always. Now, if you could have 
sat down by her, and convinced her that these were only 
senseless images, and that God was even what the Jews 
afterwards came to think him, a great being, ordinarily invisi- 
ble, sitting on a throne in the heavens, you would have made 
her heart desolate, you would have seemed to be taking 
away her gods ; for now they were close by, she could see 
them, handle them, appeal to them for help. But that would 
mean that he was far away, invisible, and perhaps too far 
away to hear or to care. 

I believe it is something like this sense of desolation that 
comes over the heart of a firm believer in the Catholic 
Church when he is asked to surrender his faith in the saints, 
in the Virgin Mary; when he is asked to give up those 



The Individual Soul wider Law 75 

images, those statues, that, while they are not real persons, 
do at any rate seem to make them nearer. It is a perfectly 
human feeling. You know that the photograph is not your 
friend- and yet, somehow, the friend seems a little nearer 
when you are gazing upon this visible image of that friend's 
face. When you carry round in your pocket with you the 
photograph of the one you love, it seems to keep you some- 
what nearer to that friend. So this is perfectly natural and 
human. 

And yet where are we to-day? Not only the portable 
deities of Rachel, not only the images of the Catholic, — of 
the " mother of God " and the saints, — are put away by the 
hand of rational and intelligent men and women, but we are 
in an entirely different kind of a world from that in which 
our thought and heart have been so long domesticated. We 
are in an infinite universe, so great that we seem lost, — as 
though we were suddenly taken out of the midst of a garden 
and placed in a limitless desert, where there seems no spot 
for the eye or the heart or the weary foot to rest on any 
hand. 

And not only has the universe become thus infinite to 
us, but we are told by modern science that the universe is 
under the reign of inexorable, changeless, eternal law. So, 
while we are ready to admire such a universe, to look upon 
such infinite mechanism with admiration, and talk about 
how grand it is, how marvellous the power and the wisdom 
displayed in it throughout its limitless domain, yet it does 
seem at first sight to take away our God, and leave us 
orphans, as though now we were under a despotism of un- 
feeling forces. 

Not only do I hear whispers and echoes of this from my 
own friends in this congregation, but it is in all the air. I 
received a letter from a gentleman, the editor of a publica- 



7 6 Life 

tion in New York, the last week, asking me to write some- 
thing, though he knew that he was not going to believe what 
he expected me to write, but asking me, however, in fairness, 
to present that side, saying, " I tell my readers that they 
must choose between the old God of Calvin and the great 
impersonal forces of the universe." This is the way people 
feel. We are now, they say, under the reign of law, in the 
midst of great impersonal forces that do not feel, that do 
not think, that do not love, that do not care, and we are 
victims of these forces. We must make our way in the midst 
of these as well as we can, safely, if possible, crushed by 
them, if necessary ; but, in any case, it is of no use to cry 
out, and there is nothing that we can do to change things. 
This is the feeling. 

I propose, then, this morning to discuss this general ques- 
tion a little with you, and see if we can find any daylight, 
any help, or any hope, in the midst of it all. 

In the first place, let us note that, whether we like it or 
not, whether we lose God by it or find him, whether we feel 
desolate-hearted or comforted by the fact, it is a fact that 
this universe is governed according to changeless, universal, 
inexorable, eternal law. Turn whichever way we will, we are 
confronted by this fact. 

It is the great achievement of modern science that it is 
bringing the universe more and more under this reign of 
law, — that is, to our thought ; for science does not create the 
law : it only discovers the actual conditions of things, and 
reveals them to us. I know, for instance, that it is in 
accordance with perfect, changeless law that these flowers 
here this morning have been unfolded. We know that, if 
a particle of dust is flying in the street, it is under the 
control of forces that act in accordance with law as much 
as is the sun in his rising or his setting. We know that 



The Individual Soul under Law yy 

every new advance that science makes only adds a new 
province, so to speak, to this empire of law. We know that 
the conditions of the atmosphere over our heads this morning 
are determined in accordance with changeless and eternal 
law ; and any competent scientific man would tell you that 
to change this atmospheric condition even to the extent of 
taking away from or adding to it one minutest particle of 
moisture would be as great and astounding a miracle as it 
would be to uproot the eternal stability of Mount Washing- 
ton and hurl it into Boston Harbor. It is in accordance 
with law that all these things are determined. This moisture, 
this water, — what is it? We know that its composition, as 
the chemist talks about it, is in accordance with eternal law. 
It is two parts by weight of hydrogen to sixteen parts of 
oxygen, or two volumes of hydrogen to one of oxygen. We 
know that it is in accordance with these definite, fixed, eternal 
proportions that water is constituted ; and, if the chemist 
should find that there was the slightest or most infinitesimal 
variation here, it would appall him as much as it would the 
astronomer to find out that the sun was ten seconds late in 
rising some morning. It would mean that the omnipotent 
grasp that was holding things in the stability of eternal order 
was being loosened, giving way j that chaos was coming 
again. 

Everywhere, then, from star dust over our heads, of which 
worlds and systems are being made, to the dust of the streets 
beneath our feet, — everywhere one scene of universal, eternal, 
inexorable law. Whether we like it or not, that is the fact. 

It is beginning to be discovered that law rules just as 
thoroughly in human life, in the development of governments, 
in the growth of social order, of the industrial civilization 
of the world, in ethics, in religion, in the highest spiritual 
realms, and that we are as truly under the reign of law here 
as we are in the lower realms of life. This, too, is a fact. 



78 Life 

Now, perhaps it will clear the matter a little if we ask 
ourselves what we mean by the universe being under the 
reign of law. People are frequently fooled by words, com- 
forted by words with nothing behind them, frightened by 
words with nothing behind them. What do we mean 
by law ? 

The word " law " is popularly used in three senses. Not 
that there are not more than three senses, but that these 
three are of importance for us to note for a moment. We 
hear in the churches and in religion, and, as we read the 
Bible, about the law of Moses. That means a certain set of 
institutions, of rites and ceremonies, supposed to have been 
established by Moses. The Jews thought that only by recog- 
nition of and obedience to this Mosaic law could they get 
into favor with God. But we now recognize a large part of 
that institution as only man-made, temporary, and as passed 
away. That, then, is one sense in which the word "law" is 
used, as referring to the law of Moses. 

Then, it is used in the sense in which we apply it when we 
speak of statutes or enactments of a king or Parliament or 
Congress. The people make laws, we say ; that is, they 
declare that the people are the subjects of these laws, that 
they shall follow certain prescribed methods of conduct, they 
shall do this, they shall refrain from that. You will notice 
here that the law is not necessarily a part of the nature 
of things. It may be merely a whim of the ruler, whether 
of the king or the people. It may be some arbitrary thing 
that has been determined upon, not necessarily inherent in 
human nature or the nature of things. This is statute law. 

Now, we do not mean either of these things when we speak 
of law as the scientific world uses the word. What do we 
mean? People talk about law as though it were a some- 
thing, — a thing, an entity, a power. Even scientific men 






The Individual Soul wider Law yg 

speak frequently in a way entirely unwarranted. They talk 
about our being governed by law. We are not governed by 
law, unless the word " by " be used in the sense of in accord 
with. Law, in the scientific sense of the word, is simply an 
expression of the sanity of the universe. It means nothing 
more nor less than that events occur in an orderly way, not 
in an illogical, arbitrary, absurd, disorderly way. It means 
that, when you observe a certain event, that event is always 
preceded by something which can rationally be looked upon 
as the cause of it. For instance, if you see a flower, you 
know perfectly well that that flower was unfolded from a 
seed. You speak of the seed having been cultivated in 
fitting soil, and as having developed into the flower. A 
thousand things conspire to develop it, and all the things 
that go to the production of a rose are spoken of as the 
cause of that rose \ and if these causes were changed, if any 
one of them were taken away, if the conditions had been 
modified, the result would have been modified. Why do we 
know so ? Because we know that the universe is one of law 
and order, and that all events are preceded by fitting con- 
ditions, which may be looked upon and spoken about as the 
causes of events. All we mean, then, when we talk about 
the universe as being the scene of the reign of law, is that 
God is a sane, a logical, an orderly being, and that he gov- 
erns things in such a way that the universe is a scene of 
order, not a scene of disorder : that is all. 

Would you have it otherwise ? Would it be encouraging 
or discouraging to find any sign of its being otherwise ? It 
means simply this, — that God acts always in the best possi- 
ble way. We know that water freezes at a certain tempera- 
ture, that it will always freeze at that temperature, other 
things being the same. We know that it will boil at a cer- 
tain temperature, and always at the same temperature, other 



80 Life 

things being the same ; that at a still higher temperature it 
will evaporate and disappear in the air, and always at that 
temperature. We know that iron possesses certain qualities 
that are spoken of as the laws of its constitution, that under 
precisely the same circumstances these qualities will be pre- 
cisely the same, that iron will always act in a certain definite 
way. The chemist knows that all his gases will act in this 
precise and definite way, as the astronomer knows that every 
star will obey the laws of its nature and constitution. All 
this means only that God is an orderly being. 

One element of confusion that I need to notice befcce 
going farther, that comes in here and that troubles us very 
much in considering this question, is the inherited idea of a 
dualism in things. The most of us still, even if we say with 
our lips that we believe that we are parts of the universe, do 
not really believe it. We have mentally established a dualism, 
instead of a unity. We talk about nature and God, — two of 
them, — nature something outside of and separate from God. 
It used to be universally believed that nature was a sort of 
mechanism which at a certain time God invented, created, 
or whatever word you choose to use ; that he imposed upon 
it certain laws, choosing what those laws should be, making 
them arbitrary, and that he set this great machine going and 
made it the scene of human life ; that he is able, if he will, 
to come in and touch a spring here and modify the working 
of the machine there, seeming to an onlooker to be outside 
the natural order of things, as a man who has invented a 
steam-engine might modify or change it or make it work 
differently at one time from the way it works at another. 
But, if there is any one thing certainly established by modern 
knowledge, it is that there is no dualism in things. There is 
a oneness of things, i.e. a universe, not a duality ; and what 
we speak of as the forces of nature are not at all something 



The Individual Soul under Law 81 

outside of and separate from God. They are God's methods, 
God's habits, if you choose so to speak. God lifts the rose 
from the sod as really as though you could see him perform- 
ing the work. God swings the stars in their spheres as 
really as, to the old-time imagination, Apollo in the chariot 
drove the sun across the blue. It is God present, working, 
acting, tireless, creating, moulding, lifting, everywhere and 
forever. 

Now, then, we are ready to take the next step, and to see 
that the wisdom of God determines this fact of the change- 
less and eternal reign of law. 

Consider for a moment. If you could think of a beginning, 
— I use this simply by way of illustration, — and think of 
God as doing a certain thing the first time, of course, if he 
is perfectly wise, he did it in a perfect way. Suppose he has 
to do it again, — a thousand, a million times, to keep on doing 
it forever, — he must up to the millionth time do it in a per- 
fect or an imperfect way. If he does it in a perfect way, he 
will do it precisely as he did it first. If he does it in an im- 
perfect way, then he is something less than all-wise. The 
very wisdom of God, if we choose to look at it in that way, 
would determine this perfect and universal order. 

But let me suggest to you another way to look at it. I do 
not believe in any beginning of things. Though we cannot 
mentally comprehend it, God is eternal, and the universe is 
undoubtedly eternal also, as the natural and eternal expres- 
sion of himself. In the nature of things, then, the constitu- 
tion of the universe is eternal. It is determined by the 
nature of God ; and he is all-wise and eternal. Therefore, 
by necessity, the universe is eternal, and is governed in 
accordance with perfect wisdom, which means what we call 
perfect and changeless law. 

And now turn about and look at it, not from the point of 



82 Life 

view of God, but from our own point of view. It is not only 
in accordance with the perfect wisdom of God that we should 
be under this reign of law, but it is an absolute necessity for 
the welfare of man. 

There are only two ways by which the universe could be 
governed. One is in accordance with perfect and change- 
less law; the other, in accordance with capricious inter- 
ferences, changing things, making things work in unexpected 
ways, producing results unprepared for by the natural order. 
One would mean an orderly world, the other an illogical 
world ; one a world you could count on, the other would 
practically be a mad-house. Think of the condition of 
things, if we were not able to tell a day ahead whether water 
would freeze at a certain temperature, whether wood was 
going to retain its qualities, or whether to-morrow it would 
be something else; whether iron was to remain iron, steel 
steel, gold gold ; whether the stars were to follow their 
courses in unvarying order, or whether they would change 
from day to day and month to month ! On that theory, — 
a theory which people are foolishly longing for as a comfort 
and refuge, — the universe would be only one vast insane 
asylum, or insane and no asylum ; for an asylum is a place 
where some one not insane has charge of things. But this 
would mean that the universe itself was insane. 

Consider for a moment one or two points. Unless the 
universe is to be one unchanging scene of order, it would 
be impossible for us to know anything. What do we mean 
by knowing? We experiment, we investigate, we find out 
the qualities of things ; but, if they did not retain those 
qualities, how could we know anything? How could we 
study electricity unless we felt perfectly sure that it would 
behave in precisely the same way under the same circum- 
stances forever? To know what these qualities are under 



The Individual Soul under Law 83 

given circumstances is what we mean by knowing electricity. 
Knowledge has no other meaning. We know a rose when 
we have studied its mode of unfolding, when we have learned 
its qualities ; but, if to-morrow it might be something else, we 
should not know a rose. So, in any direction, look as you 
will, it is only because things never can change that knowl- 
edge is possible. 

And then, again, it is only because things are eternally 
the same that we can build up anything like what we call 
civilization. How could we lay out plans for the future, 
build bridges, construct ships to sail over the sea, invent 
railways and steam-engines, electric telegraphs, all those 
things that constitute the warp and woof of our civilized 
life, — how could we count on these, how could we con- 
struct them at all, if we were not perfectly certain that 
things were to go on after this perfect order of change- 
less law? 

And, then, not only knowledge and civilization, but the 
individual development, depends on this changeless condi- 
tion of things. 

As an illustration of what I mean, take those people whom 
we call uncivilized. If you study their condition, you will 
find that that which constitutes them savage and barbarous 
more than anything else is the fact that they have no knowl- 
edge of the law and order of things, and so have not devel- 
oped themselves in the study and control of these great 
natural forces. A little while ago, an epidemic broke out 
in the city of Naples. What did the people do? Study 
sanitary laws, try to find out the laws of health and control 
them? No. They organized processions and marched 
round with images of saints, and prayed to God to help 
them out of their difficulty. That is what the barbarous 
man does. But do you not see that, if we could obviate 



84 Life 

and overcome all difficulties by a prayer or ritual or 
an ejaculation, instead of being better developed in 
knowledge, in self-control, and control of the forces of the 
universe, we should be infants forever in an eternal nursery? 
Suppose I need not take any care of my health, suppose 
I break all the laws of life, and then pray to God to help me 
out of my trouble ; suppose I need not build a bridge safe, 
strong, according to the laws of the materials of which it is 
constructed, but ask God to hold it up while I am driving 
over in my carriage ; suppose I need not construct my rail- 
way properly, but ask God to keep me out of difficulty; 
suppose I need not study the laws of navigation or build 
my ship safely, but pray to God to save me from the storm, — 
do you not see that in a universe like this there would be no 
self-culture, no soul development, no growing up to be men 
and women, understanding the forces of things, dealing with 
them, shaping and controlling them? There would be the 
same danger in such a universe as I sometimes notice in the 
case of the son or daughter of a very rich man. What is 
this danger ? Why, they say, " My father is rich : it does 
not make any difference whether I know anything or not, 
whether I learn to do anything, whether I train my brain, 
whether I cultivate my hand, whether I learn a trade or 
not." Perhaps it does not, if all a man has to do is to go 
through life a baby, or a comfortable animal, with something 
to eat and something to drink and something to keep him 
from freezing to death. But, if he is to be a man, then some- 
thing very different must be done. Do you not see that in 
such a universe all motive would be taken away for training 
ourselves, for growing, for becoming something, for thinking, 
feeling, aspiring, for understanding how to master conditions 
and to shape the forces of the universe ? It would then be 
the doom of the soul if we were to be taken out of this 



The Individual Soul tinder Law 85 

orderly universe and put where we could have all that we 
wanted for the asking. 

We come now to another point which is of perhaps quite 
as much importance as any of the rest. Does this fact of 
the universal reign of law take away our personal relation 
to God ? Does it make prayer an absurdity ? Does it take 
away our Father, and leave us merely in the hands of im- 
personal forces? Why, it seems to me, friends, that it is 
only a thoughtless philosophy that says so. Under the old 
theory, when God was away off there in the heavens some- 
where and man was here in the midst of the natural forces, 
that was the time when we were really far from God. Per- 
haps men could then go to him and get help in their trouble, 
and perhaps they could not. Certainly, they did not always 
succeed. But men were farther from him in a sense than 
they are to-day. Let us wake up to the great truth, the 
grandest truth of modern revelation, — that God is nearer to 
us to-day than the breath we breathe, nearer to us than our 
pulse-beat, nearer to us than the thought most secret in the 
brain. In him we live and move and have our being. We 
cannot take a step, we cannot lift a hand, we cannot breathe 
a breath, we cannot open our eyes, we cannot listen, but we 
are dealing first hand with God, face to face, forever. 

And suppose he does not save us always by interference 
with his own methods of work. How can he ? This method 
is God right here. It is not asking God to save us from 
some hostile power : it is asking God to undo with one 
hand what he has done with the other. It is asking him 
to save us from himself. It is asking him to change his 
eternal order for our petty convenience, when he is all the 
time saying to us, Learn my order and obey, and perfect 
shall be the life that shall result from it. 

Then another thing. Suppose we are suffering as the 



86 Life 

result of a broken law which God cannot change for our 
whim without upsetting the order of things, — even then we 
need not feel that we are away from God's love. I have 
had an experience that teaches me this, and you have had 
similar experiences. Suppose my little boy meets with an 
accident and must undergo a surgical operation. I force 
him, if need be, to go through with it, not because I do not 
care, but because I care so much that I would take ten times 
the pain gladly if I might. But just because I love him I 
grasp him in my arms, so that he cannot escape, and force 
him to bear what to him is torture. Is prayer to me under 
those circumstances absurd ? It is, if he asks me to leave 
him so. But if he cries out in his pain, " Papa," if he looks 
up into my face to be sure that I am there, sure that I am 
going to see him clear through his trouble, there is no 
absurdity. Is there not wisdom as well as infinite tender- 
ness in that kind of prayer ? God holds us in his arms and 
will not let us escape when we have broken his laws, not 
because he does not love us, but because he does love us 
so much that he will make us suffer for the sake of the 
culture and development that come by suffering. 

Then look at prayer in another way, for I believe that 
prayer is a power; and it is a power, not in spite of the 
laws of the universe, but just because the universe is law- 
ful. How shallow people's thoughts are about these things ! 
Every one of you is praying all the time. You cannot 
escape it if you try. God is the source of all things. You 
reach out your hand to take something: that is a prayer. 
You make a combination, an invention, you bring to pass 
something that would not have happened but for you and 
the universe working together, and that is the result of deal- 
ing with the forces of this universe, that is dealing with 
God; and you gain this from God by study and under- 



The Individual Soul under Law 87 

standing and obeying. And this is a kind of prayer. You 
bring to pass things that never would have happened but 
for your intervention. You do not do it by breaking law, 
but by learning and obeying law. Every steam-engine, every 
great invention, means simply that man has studied God, 
has learned the conditions by which his powers will work, 
has complied with those conditions, and so has prayed to 
God and received an answer. 

And in the spiritual realm how is it ? Shall we believe 
that everything down here is different from what it is in the 
spiritual realm ? Are there not spiritual laws with which we 
must comply, spiritual conditions ? I believe that this up- 
looking, this prayer, may just as really be a compliance with 
spiritual conditions, in accordance with which my soul may 
grow, as is my establishing a manufactory by complying with 
the conditions that God has established. 

Let me try to hint what I mean by one or two illustrations. 
Suppose a flower to be endowed with personality and intel- 
ligence, and suppose it should say, " I have been taught all 
my life that my beauty and growth have been dependent 
upon the sun ; but now I have learned at last that the sun 
in its activity is under changeless law." Suppose this flower 
was situated somewhere in the shade, and it was a question 
whether it should go into the sun or not. It might say: 
"The sun is apparently helpless. What is the use of my 
doing anything about it ? I cannot change anything : I 
might as well remain where I am." But the flower, if it 
would go out into the sunshine, if it would come into right 
relations with this changeless force, that force would produce 
results that would not otherwise come to pass. 

Suppose an artist, who wishes to improve himself, sits 
down in front of some great work of art, and worships it, we 
will say; that is, admires it, for worship is only another 



88 Life 

name for admiration. He feels himself lifted, thrilled, ex- 
alted, in the presence of that picture. He looks up to it as 
a source of help and strength. He does not expect the 
picture to change or do anything. If he thought it might, it 
would defeat the very purpose of his mind. Suppose he 
prays for light, for strength, for inspiration, for comfort, for 
help. If he studies it, if he worships it enough, it will 
inspire, it will lift, it will thrill his heart, it will touch and 
kindle his brain, it will lead to cultivation of his muscular 
power of execution, so that he becomes a grander painter 
than he otherwise would be. 

So let me think of God. If God did not care, even 
though he were as insensible as the sun or the painting, yet 
to lift up the heart and the soul in the presence of this 
divine ideal would even then have power to lift, change, 
transform, remould us. How much more, when we know that, 
as we come into this presence", it is the eternal love of the 
eternal Father that is shining down upon us, the eternal 
beauty and the eternal good, and that we may study the 
conditions, comply with the laws ; and all the omnipotence 
of God is at our service to transform, reshape, and lift ! 
This is the heart of prayer. I would not dare to pray to 
God if I thought I could change him. It is because I know 
I cannot, but that I know I myself am capable of infinite 
remoulding and uplifting, that I come to learn the eternal 
changeless conditions, and so come nearer to him forever. 

In this theory of things, then, we may go on into the next 
life, not into a scene of idleness, rest, and perfect attainment 
but to a scene worthy of a growing, immortal soul, a place 
for study, a place where we may still find out conditions 
for higher and grander advance, a place where we may be 
thrilled by the joy of achievement, and go on from victory 
to victory forever and ever. 



GOODNESS AND MORAL EVIL. 



The existence of what is called moral evil has been, 
perhaps, the most serious stumbling-block of the ages in the 
pathway of human trust in the goodness that governs the 
world. In early days, when people believed in the multi- 
plicity of gods, though they could not think of everything as 
being by any possibility good, they had no difficulty in ex- 
plaining the existence of both goodness and evil ; for they 
did it by the simple method of supposing that the kindly 
gods were the source of all the good, and the malignant ones 
the cause of all the evil. There was a time in the history 
of Jewish thought, after it had developed its magnificent 
monotheism, as represented by its greater prophets, when 
they frankly faced the facts, and said that God was equally 
the source of the good and of the evil. Isaiah, for example, 
represents Jehovah as saying, " I form light and create dark- 
ness ; I make peace and create evil ; I, the Lord, do all 
these things." But in their later life, after they came in 
contact with Persian dualism, a system of thought that repre- 
sented the good and the evil of the world as the result of the 
age-long conflict between two rival deities, the Jews them- 
selves changed their philosophy of things. There grew up a 
belief in the existence of a great adversary, an evil power, 
only less mighty than the Omnipotent himself ; and to him, 
to his agency, they attributed the fact that sin and sorrow 
and death had come into the world. 



90 Life 

I wish to call your attention afresh to the mystery of this 
existence of moral evil as it has been held and taught in 
the creeds of Christendom. I am well aware that you are 
familiar with the main outlines as I shall present them to 
you; but I need to present them afresh, because I wish 
them as a background against which to draw another theory 
of things which seems to me more consistent with modern 
knowledge, more consistent with human hope, more con- 
sistent with our great, loving trust in our Father in heaven. 

What, then, is the main outline of human history as touch- 
ing this matter of moral evil, as it has been held in the 
thought of Christendom for fifteen hundred years ? 

It started, they tell us, before the creation of the world. 
There was at some distant period in the past a revolt even 
in heaven itself. Lucifer, the light-bringer, the leader of 
all the angels, is supposed to have rebelled against the om- 
nipotent power ; of course a hopeless revolt, and, of course, 
he was cast out into the place prepared for him, where, with 
varying alternations of imprisonment and release, he has 
made his home from that time to this. And from that time 
to this his power has been pitted against the Almighty, who, 
for some mysterious, inexplicable reason, permitted him to 
lay waste and devastate God's fair world, and interfere with 
the progress of the universe as God had originally planned 
it. He then, in pursuance of his evil purpose, tempts man 
to his fall, and the earth is ruined. Then, for four thousand 
years, — I speak, of course, according to the popular chro- 
nology of the creeds, — God does nothing to save the world 
except to reveal himself to one of the smallest nations of 
the earth, training them, with varying success and failure, 
through all these years, but, mark you, not even telling 
them that the world had fallen, not even telling them clearly 
that they were to live again after death and that the fruit of 






Goodness and Moral Evil 91 

their disobedience was to be eternal pain. Then, at the 
end of these four thousand years, the Omnipotent himself 
comes to the earth for the purpose of redeeming it. He 
lives as a man for thirty years unknown. Then there is one 
year of public life in which he preaches and teaches the few 
who are gathered about him. He is then put to death, and 
disappears from the earth, having planted this seed of new 
life in the hearts of mankind, which issues in the organiza- 
tion of the Christian Church, the purpose of which is to re- 
generate and save mankind. With what result ? 

Nearly two thousand years have passed since God himself 
specially visited the earth to save it ; and, presumably, during 
all that time he has been doing his utmost. With what 
result ? I ask. That to-day perhaps one-third of the people 
of the world have heard that he has been here ; and the 
majority of those who have heard the story do not believe 
it, do not pay any practical attention to it. And the out- 
come of it is to be that the world is to go on in this fashion 
for nobody knows how many ages ; and, meanwhile, all those 
who die without having been especially prepared are to go to 
eternal sorrow, a sorrow that is to send up its hopeless wail 
forever. No wonder that the existence and the devastating 
effects of moral evil have been a mystery to oppress and 
weigh down the heart of the race. The only wonder is that 
more sensitive souls who have sympathetically appreciated 
what it all means have not gone wild in the midst of the un- 
bearable perplexity. 

How it has touched, how it has impressed those who 
think, how it has troubled the brains and the hearts of some 
of the noblest even of those who have accepted it, thinking 
they must, I wish to give you an illustration. You must 
pardon me if I read you a whole page, for I cannot spare 
a sentence of it; and you must pardon me, even though 



92 Life 

on a former occasion I read you at least a part of it. I 
need it here. I want it for the sake of impressing this 
lesson and as leading to that which is to follow. 

When I was a boy in the Sunday-school down in Maine 
there was no religious name in America so familiar to me 
as that of Rev. Albert Barnes. He was a Presbyterian, a 
preacher in Philadelphia, perhaps the best known orthodox 
preacher in the country ; and that not simply because he was 
a great preacher, which he was, but because he was the 
author of a series of notes on the Gospels and different parts 
of the Bible, which were at that day the great popular com- 
mentary of the country, and which were used in almost all 
the Sunday-schools as explaining most parts of the New 
Testament and many parts of the Old. Dr. Barnes never 
wavered, so far as I know, in his acceptance of this general 
outline of the " mystery of iniquity " which I have just given 
to you ; and yet here is what he says about it, showing how 
it troubled him, showing what a difficulty it was to both 
his mind and his heart : — 

That the immortal mind should be allowed to jeopard its infinite wel- 
fare, and that trifles should be allowed to draw it away from God and 
virtue and Heaven; that any should suffer forever, — lingering on in 
hopeless despair and rolling amidst infinite torments, without the possi- 
bility of alleviation and without end ; that since God can save men, and 
will save a part, he has not purposed to save all ; that, on the supposi- 
tion that the atonement is ample, and that the blood of Christ can 
cleanse from all and every sin, it is not in fact applied to all; that, in a 
word, a God who claims to be worthy of the confidence of the universe, 
and to be a being of infinite benevolence, should make such a world as 
this, full of sinners and sufferers ; and that, when an atonement had been 
made, He did not save all the race, and put an end to sin and woe for- 
ever, — these, and kindred difficulties, meet the mind when we think on 
this great subject; and they meet us when we endeavor to urge our 
fellow-sinners to be reconciled to God, and to put confidence in Him. 
On this ground they hesitate. These are real, not imaginary difficulties. 



Goodness and Moral Evil 93 

They are probably felt by every mind that has ever reflected on the sub- 
ject ; and they are unexplained, unmitigated, unremoved. I confess, for 
one, that I feel them, and feel them more sensibly and powerfully the 
more I look at them, and the longer I live. I do not understand these 
facts; and I make no advances towards understanding them. I do not 
know that I have a ray of light on this subject, which I had not when the 
subject first flashed across my soul. 

I have read, to some extent, what wise and good men hrve written; I 
have looked at their theories and explanations ; I have endeavored to 
weigh their arguments ; for my whole soul pants for light and relief on 
these questions. But I get neither ; and, in the distress and anguish of 
my own spirit, I confess that I see no light whatever. I see not one ray 
to disclose to me the reason why sin came into the world, why the earth 
is strewed with the dying and the dead, and why man must suffer to all 
eternity. 

I have never yet seen a particle of light thrown on these subjects, that 
has given a moment's ease to my tortured mind ; nor have I an explana- 
tion to offer, or a thought to suggest, that would be of relief to you. I 
trust other men — as they profess to do — understand this better than I 
do, and that they have not the anguish of spirit which I have ; but I con- 
fess, when I look on a world of sinners and sufferers, upon death-beds 
and graveyards, upon the world of woe, filled with hosts to suffer for- 
ever; when I see my friends, my parents, my family, my people, my 
fellow-citizens, — when I look upon a whole race, all involved in this sin 
and danger ; and when I see the great mass of them wholly unconcerned, 
and when I feel that God only can save them, and yet he does not do it, — 
I am struck dumb. It is all dark, dark, dark to my soul, and I cannot 
disguise it. 

So much for the feeling of one who accepts, who believes, 
because he feels himself compelled to believe, in this theory 
of the origin, the nature, and the consequences of moral 
evil. 

If I had time, or if it were necessary, as it is germane to 
my subject, I could take up the theory point by point, and 
show you how a more careful examination only intensifies the 
difficulty. As an illustration of what I mean, think of the 
absolute impossibility of an archangel's rebelling in heaven. 



94 Life 

He knew that God was all-righteous, and that only in know- 
ing and obeying him were happiness and peace for himself. 
Utterly causeless, utterly hopeless, utterly inexplicable, that 
such a thing ever could be ! Who will offer any clearer ex- 
planation as to why God should permit such a power (grant- 
ing its existence) to wander at large through his universe, 
devastating the fairest part of it, producing results of suffer- 
ing that were to be eternal? 

So I might take up point after point of this theory, and 
show the utter impossibility of reconciling it either with the 
mind, the conscience, or the heart; but I pass all that by 
with just this brief hint, and come to what seems to me a 
more rational theory as to the nature, the origin, and the out- 
tome of moral evil. 

What is the attitude that we are compelled to take as the 
result of the growth of modern knowledge concerning the 
nature and origin of man and the course of human history ? 
The old scene shifts and utterly fades away. Put it entirely 
one side, and let us go down the ages towards the beginning, 
with all these confusions out of our brain, and see what we 
actually find. 

We find, first, a world with no humanity in it : of course, a 
world where there is suffering, where there is death among 
the lower forms of life, and where, of course, all talk of good 
and evil in a moral sense is out of place. Out of this world 
of the lower forms of life we see humanity gradually emerge. 
As humanity develops, what is the necessary, the natural 
result ? Why, man, developed in intelligence, developed in 
sympathy, developed in consciousness of himself and a con- 
science of others, recognizes the natural, necessary, eter- 
nal distinctions between good and evil. Evil is not an entity 
that comes into the world, a thing that we need to account 
for. If we are going to account for either, we need to con- 



Goodness and Moral Evil 95 

sider the development out of an unmoral world of morality. 
It is the origin of good that we are to deal with. But good 
and evil in the nature of things are twin-born. You can no 
more conceive of one without the other than you can of light 
without shadow, or heat without cold, or music without dis- 
cord, or pleasure without pain. They necessarily go to- 
gether, mutually limiting and explaining and helping to the 
comprehension of each other, so that, if man is to be a moral 
being at all, then both good and evil must exist. But there 
must be developed a conscience concerning them. 

And what is this conscience ? The most natural thing in 
the world. As man develops in brain and sympathy and 
heart, he recognizes of course other people as other selves. 
He says: Here is another man who wants to possess the 
same things that I possess, and naturally has the same right 
to them. He wants happiness as much as I do. He is ca- 
pable of suffering as much as I am. In short, he has the 
faculties and powers that I have, all the desires, all the 
aspirations, all the hopes, all the fears. And there neces- 
sarily comes along with a consciousness of this the feeling — 
I have no more right to injure him, to make him suffer, than 
he has to make me suffer. So there develops the con- 
science as naturally as a flower unfolds. The good and the 
evil go together. 

We fool ourselves so with words ! We assume that God 
might have helped it, — that he let evil and suffering come 
into the world on purpose, in order to afflict and trouble 
humanity ; but these things have no relation to power. There 
are some things that Omnipotence cannot do, because they 
are absurd. He cannot put into the brain of man the thought 
of light without its complementary thought of shadow; for 
light as light has no meaning else. He cannot put into the 
mind of man the thought of pleasure apart from the possi- 



g6 Life 

bility of pain, because, otherwise, pleasure would have no 
meaning. It is impossible that good, the thought, the con- 
sciousness of good should exist without the opposite con- 
sciousness of evil. The two are naturally related and 
necessary to each other. 

Again, it is simply absurd in the very nature of things for 
us to suppose that God could create a moral being in any 
other way than that through which he is creating us moral 
beings all the time. He might, indeed, conceivably create a 
set of automatons to be wound up and go through a set of 
mechanical motions for a period of time until they run down 
again ; but the only way by which men as they develop can 
learn things is by experience. That is the only way they can 
learn the distinction between good and evil, learn to avoid the 
evil and to choose the good, learn to recognize that on the 
good depend happiness and peace and welfare for themselves 
and all mankind. And to suppose that the Omnipotent him- 
self could create a race of moral beings in any other way is 
to suppose an absurdity. 

Now, then, let us look over the world, and see what we 
shall think of this fact of moral evil. They have been telling 
us for ages that man is a being totally depraved, naturally, 
inherently, essentially wrong ; and they talk about the world 
as being an evil world. On the other hand, I dare make this 
assertion and challenge contradiction from any and every 
quarter: there is not one faculty, not one characteristic or 
quality inherent in, essential, necessary to, human nature, that 
is not in itself altogether and always good. There is no 
essential, natural, necessary evil in humanity whatsoever, and 
never has been, and never can be. And outside of humanity 
in the world there exists absolutely nothing that is in itself 
essentially, necessarily evil. 

Consider for a moment : there are only two possible ways 



Goodness and Moral Evil 97 

by which any man ever did wrong or ever could do wrong. 
It is by perverted or wrong use of a faculty or quality or 
power which in itself and in its right action is right. Take 
my hand, for example. The hand is all right. There is 
nothing essentially evil in it. I can use it properly for a good 
purpose, — to help, to add to the happiness, the well-being of 
my fellows and myself, — or I can use it to harm. But 
because it can be perverted, because it can be used for a 
wrong purpose, it does not make the hand itself evil. And 
as of the hand, so equally of every single member, faculty, 
quality, characteristic, power, of human nature. From head 
to foot, physically, mentally, morally, spiritually, there is noth- 
ing necessarily, inherently evil : all is good. 

The other way by which a man can do wrong is by the 
excessive or overmuch use or indulgence of some power, 
some quality, characteristic, which in itself is perfectly right. 
There is no possible action, then, of which you can conceive 
that in itself is necessarily wrong. 

Let us take two or three illustrations from the Ten Com- 
mandments. Take the question of killing a man. "Thou 
shalt not kill." Is that wrong or right ? You are perfectly 
well aware that in one case killing may be murder and in 
another case it may be heroism. The killing, the act itself, 
has no inherent, essential, necessary moral quality at all. It 
may be good or bad according to circumstances. 

" Thou shalt not steal." Taking away something which is 
supposed to belong to another ; — the act of stealing, is 
simply a taking away. Taking it wrongfully, taking that 
which really belongs to another, and to which you have no 
right, this is theft. But are there not a hundred circum- 
stances in which it is conceivable that it might not only be 
right, but an act of justice, to take away something which 
is in the possession of another ? It is not the act of taking 
away itself that is wrong. 



98 Life 

" Thou shalt not covet." What does that mean ? We 
naturally and necessarily desire to possess things ; and this 
desire is nothing more or less than an extension up through 
the higher ranges of our nature of the physical quality of 
hunger. And what does hunger mean ? Simply the reaching 
out after the necessary materials on which to feed and grow. 
Hunger is right. Desire for anything in the heavens above 
or the earth beneath is right, — as right as it is for a flower 
to long for sunshine and droop for it. It is only desiring 
excessively or wrongly, or desiring that leads to my taking 
away things that do not belong to me, or taking them in 
violent and injurious ways, that is wrong. The desire it- 
self, the wish for all good things, is not only right, but neces- 
sary to existence itself. 

What is ambition that is so much decried ? I would not 
give much for the man or woman who had not ambition, — a 
desire to excel, a desire to grow, to be great, a desire to be 
well i thought of by one's fellows. These are the very root 
and essence of self-respect and all that is noblest and best 
in men and women. Of course, it can be perverted; of 
course, it can be excessive ; of course, I can be willing to 
gratify my ambition at the expense of the welfare and happi- 
ness of -other people. And when it so trespasses, when it 
goes beyond the limits of that which is allowable, of that 
which is consistent with the rights and welfare of other 
people, it becomes wrong ; but it is not wrong in itself. 

So of pride, so of all characteristics. You cannot find in 
the whole catalogue of the world's possible activities anything 
that in itself is essentially, necessarily evil. Evil is only the 
perversion or the excessive use of that which is naturally 
right. 

What are the springs, the sources, then, of moral evil? 
How is it that men do transgress so frequently ? How is it 



Goodness and Moral Evil 99 

that there is so much of what we call sin, and consequently 
so much of sorrow in the world ? It has its root in the fact 
which is the hope of the universe and not its despair. We 
couple sin and sorrow together. Why? Because this is a 
righteous universe, and you cannot knowingly or unknow- 
ingly transgress one of its laws and escape the penalty. It 
means that these laws are the necessary and constituent laws 
of things, so that this very fact that we do couple sin and 
sorrow together is in itself an utter refutation of any charge 
that can be brought against the essential goodness of the 
world. 

What, then, are the sources of moral evil practically? 
They are three, and I believe only three. 

In the first place, having been developed as we have from 
the animal world, so far as our physical and many of our 
mental and even our moral characteristics are concerned, it 
is perfectly natural that men should be overweighted with 
passion, with impulses, with feelings that the animals possess. 
The quality of the tiger and the fox and the bear still clings 
to us. But there cannot be too much passion, provided 
there be rational control adequate to the passion ; for pas- 
sion, impulse, feeling, are the motive force of the universe. 
The world would come to a stand-still, and nothing grand 
would ever be done, were it not for the existence of passion, 
which is ever power. There cannot, then, be too much, pro- 
vided it be under proper control. The source of a large 
part of the world's evil is that men and women are unbal- 
anced, that passion is mightier than reason, than conscience; 
and this way and that, like ships in storms at sea, they are 
swept out of their course, and sometimes are overwhelmed by 
the waters. 

The next source of moral evil as it appears practically in 
the history of the world is ignorance. People are perpetually 



ioo Life 

deceiving themselves, perpetually fooling themselves. They 
desire something which in itself is good ; but they are not 
willing to wait for the right way of getting it. They cheat 
themselves into believing that they can get it by some round- 
about or indirect method, and still have it as good to them 
after they get it. They cheat themselves, because they do 
not know as yet what kind of a universe this is. Do you 
suppose that there is a man in all this world that would de- 
liberately, weighing the consequences, seeing everything in- 
volved, choose the evil, knowing that evil necessarily means 
unhappiness, injury to himself and to everybody involved? 
That would be insanity. No man ever chose evil that way. 
He cheats himself into thinking that somehow or other he 
will be able to escape the consequences ; that somehow or 
other the universe is going to make an exception in his case. 
He has not thoroughly learned the lesson yet that clear- 
headed wisdom teaches, that it never pays to do wrong. 

The third source of evil is lack of faith, — and this I be- 
lieve to be perhaps the most important of all, — the lack of 
trust. In other words, it is despair. I believe that, if you go 
over the face of this poor old earth to-day, and visit all its 
dens, its slums, its prisons, and come in contact with all its 
criminal classes, you will find that the chief secret of the 
criminality may be summed up in the one word " despair." 
These are not strong people. They are the people who have 
fought awhile with the forces that have environed them, and 
have become discouraged. They have given it up. They 
have lost faith in the reality of justice and goodness in the 
world. They do not believe that in the long run the out- 
come shall be good. They have lost confidence in God, in 
themselves, in their fellows, in the world. They think that 
it is not worth while to wait. So they strike out and clutch 
at this thing and that, trying to seize it violently instead of 



Goodness and Moral Evil 101 

trusting that all things come to those who can wait, and that 
at any rate, whatever comes or whatever goes, he who is true 
to himself, to his fellows, and to his God, actually does gain 
the best. If a man only believed that, — which is true, — if 
he only trusted that, — which is certain, — you could not con- 
ceive of him as breaking a law, as doing wrong. 

I believe this : that all the moral evil that comes into 
actuality in human life is developed from these three sources, 
— the unbalanced passion, the ignorance, the lack of trust. 

How, then, is this evil to be outgrown ? I believe that 
in the long run it will prove at last not to have been either 
lack of love or wisdom or power on God's part ; that it is 
the necessary process of experience through which the race 
must be passed in coming to its higher education* 

How is it to be outgrown ? It is being outgrown. The 
sources that I have pointed out are hints as to how. As the 
world becomes more civilized, men climb gradually up from 
the animal ranges into the higher, the human part of us. 
Passion becomes controlled, refined, elevated, turned to 
higher uses. The man becomes humane ; the brain, heart, 
conscience, become supreme, and so the lower life is ruled 
and relegated to its proper sphere. Then, as the world grows 
wiser and men learn to know more and more that righteous- 
ness does mean happiness, that this is not a world, as we 
used to be taught, in which all the pleasure and the good 
time belong to those who are breaking God's laws, only they 
will have to suffer the penalty for it in the future world, we 
learn that the goodness, the happiness, and the pleasure of 
this world go together, and that now it pays to do right ; that 
now the way of the transgressor is hard, not merely that the 
end of the way is hard. 

And then, as the world grows older, it is learning more 
and more the lesson of trust. It is more and more believing 



102 Life 

in the essential goodness of things, the integrity of the 
world, the integrity of humanity, and so learning the lesson 
of patience and of waiting ; that, in spite of the charges that 
are brought against this poor human nature of ours, there is 
infinitely more of good than there is of evil, infinitely more 
of love than there is of hate, infinitely more of helpfulness 
and kindliness than there is of conscious and purposive 
injury. The good is in an immense majority. The quiet, the 
order, the peace, the progress of society, on the whole and in 
the long run, testify to this, day after day. 

And the outcome ? Why, the outcome is like the gradua- 
tion of the scholar from the school. When we have learned 
the lesson, by and by, as the ages pass, 

" The low, sad music of humanity " 

shall sink down the past to be heard no more, and in its 
place shall be the song of happiness and peace and good 
will that shall make the earth seem indeed a veritable king- 
dom of our Father. 



MY LIFE'S MEANING. 



I remember a story told of a conversation between the 
Duke of Wellington and a young man who had been stationed 
as a missionary at some far-off point, and, having become 
somewhat discouraged, had returned. The duke asked why 
he had come home. " Do you not believe," asked the duke, 
" that it is a part of the purpose of God to bring all the 
world to the knowledge of the truth ? " The young man 
replied that of course he did. " Do you not believe," said 
the duke, " that you could do something to further that plan 
by remaining where you have been stationed ? " He replied 
that of course he did. " Then," said the duke, " go back to 
your post, and stay there until you receive authoritative 
orders to occupy some other position." 

It would be very easy, I suppose, for all of us to do that, 
if we could really believe that somebody, with the adequate 
wisdom, the adequate power, the adequate love, had put us 
somewhere and had told us to stay. That which makes it 
hard is the doubt that insinuates itself into so many minds 
in the modern world as to whether there is any special 
meaning in my life or in yours, as to whether there is any 
particular object to be gained, anything to make it worth 
while for us to endure hardness like good soldiers. And it 
is, — there is no use in disguising it, — it is more difficult 
to-day for us to believe this than it "was for people to believe 



104 Life 

it a hundred or two hundred or five hundred years ago. I 
have had occasion to refresh your memory with what you all 
know, — as to how diminutive a thing the universe was then 
as compared with our present conception of it. In a small 
world, with God close by, — a world over which God's 
angels were habitually passing and returning, like ministers 
of the king, keeping oversight of this and of that ; in a 
little world where we could believe that we were really 
under the eye of a great Being, who had made us and had 
placed us where we were, and who had appointed us a per- 
fectly definite thing to do, — in a world like that, I say, so 
small, so comprehensible, it was a comparatively easy thing 
for people to believe that their little selves were really part 
of a divine plan, and that it was important for them to stick 
to the post to which they had been assigned until they 
received authoritative orders to occupy some other position. 

It is harder to believe it now, because the universe seems 
so vast, and because the old heaven, just beyond the blue, 
has faded away, and there is found no place for it, because 
we cannot think of God as present in the old sense, — as an 
outlined being, sitting somewhere, issuing orders, telling us 
what we are to do, offering us rewards for doing, or threaten- 
ing us with penalties if we are faithless. All this definite 
picture has dissolved like morning mist ; and we look this 
way and that, and wonder where God is, if he is anywhere. 
We wonder if he really finds time, in the midst of his infi- 
nite occupations, even to remember that we exist, much 
more to care whether we are doing this thing or doing that. 
Whether he does care, whether he knows, whether he thinks 
of you and me, we must find out in the first place, or come 
to the holding of a general theory, at any rate, by consider- 
ing for a little a larger problem. 

Have we any right to think there is a purpose, a meaning, 



My Life's Meaning 105 

in the universe at all ? That is the first question to be set- 
tled. Is it one wild scene of confusion ? Are we in the 
hands merely of impersonal forces ? Is there anybody who 
knows that I exist, who takes note of what I think, of what I 
do, who cares anything about it, who has any interest in 
either the steps I take or the ends I reach ? If there is a 
purpose in the universe, then, whether we can comprehend 
it or not, we may find it a rational thing for us to conclude 
that there may also be a purpose, and a definite, especial 
purpose, in our little personal lives. 

Now, friends, I do not care to trouble you any with argu- 
ments concerning the old questions of design and plan, after 
the style of Paley and the writers on " evidence " of a hun- 
dred or two hundred years ago ; but, as I survey this scene 
of things, as I fix my eyes so far as is possible on the far- 
away beginnings, as I trace the steps by which things have 
come to be where they are, and as I run my eye along these 
lines, and as I forecast, as I must, the probable, or at least 
the possible, outcome, I cannot avoid the rational conviction 
that there is purpose, that there is plan, in this "mighty 
maze " of things. 

As a hint of what I mean, we know that this solar system 
of ours has grown from star-dust to a system with the sun at 
the centre, surrounded by its planets, and they by their sat- 
ellites, moon or moons. We know that this has grown by 
orderly process, by logical steps, following an intelligible 
line of progress observable by us. Are we not, then, author- 
ized to think that, from the standpoint of that Power which 
is controlling and shaping things, this intelligible line of 
progress is intelligent purpose and plan ? How comes it to 
be intellectually intelligible to us, if there be no intelligent 
purpose working through it all ? And precisely this same 
order that we observe in the growth of our own solar system 



106 Life 

we know is in progress in all parts of space. So far as our 
instruments of investigation are able to reach, we see every- 
where this same method of creation being followed. And 
we see it now not only, but ever following the same intelli- 
gible lines. And, when our special solar system has been 
evolved, then what ? Is there no intelligible order, no sign 
of purpose or plan, running through it since that day ? It 
took ages for this earth to become capable of being inhab- 
ited by forms of life such as we are familiar with ; but, the 
moment the first tiny form appeared, there appeared also 
this same orderly movement and lift, following lines of intel- 
ligent order and growth from the beginning, climbing up 
through various structures of the lower orders until man was 
reached. Then the same order again, lifting and pushing 
and leading, until from the first physical development there 
came the mental, then the moral, then the spiritual, — a 
wavelike advance, the topmost crest of which is made up of 
the mighty souls of the world ; and the force that has led, 
that has lifted, is undiminished still, leading on with promise 
of grander things to be. 

And, then, if we choose to subdivide this human life of ours, 
if we trace the growth of the individual or of the family or 
of society or the industrial organization of the world or the 
ethical or the religious, it makes no matter which way we 
turn our eyes, in all these different departments of life we 
see parallel lines of orderly advance ; and I for one, as a 
rational being, looking over this scene which is rationally 
comprehensible, cannot escape the conviction that reason, 
plan, purpose, order, are through it all. 

If so, what ? If there are purpose and plan and order in 
the whole, then that purpose includes and must include the 
minutest part that is essential to the completeness of that 
whole. 



My Life's Meaning 107 

Take as an illustration the work of an architect. When 
he has laid out his plans for a magnificent building, that 
plan includes the proper laying of every brick, the proper 
application of every trowelful of mortar. It includes per- 
fection in the minutest parts, and they are all essential to 
the completeness of the total result. Or, when a general 
lays out the plan of a vast campaign, that plan includes not 
only the intelligence and faithfulness of his generals, but 
it includes the intelligence and the faithfulness of the offi- 
cers all the way down, and not only of the officers, but the 
intelligence and faithfulness of the poorest private and of 
the most insignificant, least important fragment of the whole 
army. All these are essential to the carrying out of his 
great plan. 

But you say — and you will say it justly, for no finite illus- 
tration can adequately set forth an infinite truth — that these 
illustrations do not teach quite enough for comfort. The 
architect does not think of every individual brick, of every 
individual trowelful of mortar. He does not think of the 
laying of each stone plumb and true and square. He cannot 
follow out all these details, keep an eye on it all, be person- 
ally interested in it all ; and so, as far as he is concerned, 
you may think of him as indifferent to all these minute 
particulars. And in the case of the general : no general is 
able to be personally acquainted with, to come into personal 
contact with, more than a few of his lieutenants and sub- 
ordinates. He cannot know every private soldier in the 
ranks. He cannot know their joys and sorrows, hopes and 
fears. The question as to whether any one private is prop- 
erly clothed and fed, as to whether he is overworked on the 
march, or whether he receives the proper amount of rest, 
does not come to him. So these illustrations do not go far 
enough. What you and I want, if we may have it, is to 



108 Life 

believe that there is a grand plan governing the universe, 
and that he who is at the head of it is acquainted with his 
lieutenants and subordinates, and that they are acquainted 
with him, and so all the way down, rank by rank, to the 
smallest private. We want to feel, if we may, no less than 
this. It is the heart hunger that he who is supreme has a 
thought of us, tells us to do our duty, to occupy this position 
or that. We want to feel that there is this personal rela- 
tionship between the individual soul, however small or poor 
or insignificant, and the one Infinite Soul which is the life 
of all. 

Have we any right to believe in so stupendous, so over- 
whelming a truth — if it be a truth — as this ? I believe 
that the illustrations which I used, though good for their 
purpose as far as they go, fall infinitely short of what we 
may trust is the grand reality of our individual lives. An 
infinite wisdom includes directly and without effort not only 
the wide scheme, but the very minutest particle of it ; and 
when I see under the microscope a little dust particle float- 
ing, or when I see some particle of matter so minute that I 
cannot discern it by the naked eye or one that I can see 
merely by the use of a scientific imagination, or when I 
think of the ultimate particles that make up a gas as in 
eternal motion sweeping round their tiny orbits, — as I think 
of these things, I am compelled to postulate the immediate 
presence, the immediate activity of God, to account for them, 
as much as I am to make me feel that Sirius is sweeping 
safely through his magnificent orbit, as much as I am to 
think that it is the divine power that sweeps to-day some- 
where through space the comet that flashed across our hori- 
zon one hundred, two hundred, five hundred years ago, that 
I know is not lost, but is following the divine path, and is 
again to delight the eyes of those who prophesied that path 



My Life's Meaning 109 

and the moment of its return. When we are dealing with an 
infinite intelligence, we are compelled to believe that that 
intelligence includes the minutest as well as the most mag- 
nificent, — includes it all from lieutenants down to privates. 
And why should we not believe it ? The only obstacle with 
which I am acquainted is merely the fact that it so over- 
whelms our imagination that we cannot think it. But there 
is no great cosmic truth with which I am familiar that we can 
think, that we can grasp ; and we must remember that the 
measure of our capacity to grasp and comprehend a thing is 
not at all the measure of its truth or reality. We may dem- 
onstrate that a certain thing is true beyond all question, and 
yet utterly fail to comprehend it. 

I believe, then, that your life and mine is a definite part 
of God's definite plan, and that he looks to you and to me 
to be faithful and true in the accomplishment of that part of 
the task which is assigned to us, and that it is important 
to the outcome as related to the whole. I had occasion, 
a few days ago, to purchase a piece of goods ; and, after I 
had decided on the pattern and the quality that suited me, 
I found that there was a defect in it, which ruined it for my 
purpose. Only one thread was wrong, but that spoiled the 
whole piece. And so even God cannot make things just 
right, — free from all defect, — except as we who are his co- 
workers see to it that the minutest part of the plan which 
has been confided to us is faithfully wrought out. 

Now, just what does this imply ? It means, I believe, a 
purpose, a plan, and in your being and in my being just 
where we are to-day. If we have done wrong, if we are in 
a false position out of which we ought to take ourselves 
immediately, even that does not touch the general truth ; for 
it means and includes this fact, that we should at once put 
ourselves right. There is a purpose and a plan, I believe, 



no Life 

in our being just where we are this moment, facing just the 
task, the duty, that lies next our hand immediately be- 
fore us. 

Does this plan include the idea that we are, as the Prayer- 
Book has it, to be " content in that station in life in which 
Providence has placed us " ? Not at all, or not necessarily. 
I believe, rather, that there should be in the souls of all of 
us a divine discontent, a desire to be more, to possess more, 
to accomplish more than we have yet been able to reach. 
But there are several limitations to this. We are not at 
liberty to gain something we desire, to change our position 
for a more favorable one, to become wiser, stronger, richer, 
to attain a more exalted station, at a cost either of utter 
faithfulness to ourselves or at the cost of that which is essen- 
tial to the life, the well-being, the happiness, of any other 
soul on earth. We are to stay where we are ; we are to fill 
the position in which we find ourselves, fill it truly, fill it 
completely, fill it with uttermost faithfulness ; and we are at 
the same time to be ready to know more, to do more, to 
become more, to occupy a better, finer, higher, more desira- 
ble position, just as soon as we can do it without being false 
to ourselves or false to our fellow-men. But I believe it is 
God's plan — it is our highest, grandest duty — to stand just 
where we are, and fill the place where we find ourselves, 
until there is a path open, — a path along which, with just 
and loving feet, we may tread, that shall lead us into a more 
desirable way. 

I know that this is a hard doctrine ; and it is not less hard 
for me than for any of you. Never think when I am preach- 
ing to you some difficult thing, something hard of accom- 
plishment, that I do it because I have found it easy. I am 
in the midst of the same struggle, subject to the same temp- 
tations, ready to stumble over the same obstacles, to soil my 



My Life's Meaning in 

robes in the same dust j and yet, seeing that which I believe 
to be the highest and best for myself, I see also that which 
is highest and best for you. 

Let us look at one or two concrete examples. Take the 
case of the young man who feels himself getting on only 
indifferently well in business, — not meeting with the kind 
or degree of success that he hoped for in his earlier days. 
And here is one on his right hand and one on his left, by 
ways which he is not quite ready to stoop to, stepping up 
and onward into higher mercantile position, places of larger 
pay and more responsibility. Shall I say to him, Stay where 
you are until, with uttermost honor, with clear-eyed truth, 
you can go into a higher place ? A thousand times yes. 
For you cannot afford to sacrifice yourself, to be less of 
a man, to injure and degrade the life of one of your fellow- 
men, for the sake of apparent haste towards business success. 
That man makes poor speed who outruns and leaves behind 
his own soul. 

Or take the case of the woman whose life is narrow, poor, 
hindered, hampered at every turn. I know thousands of 
such, capable of thought, capable of study, capable of social 
enjoyments, capable of all sorts of high and fine things 
which are yet forbidden. Why? They are tied to the 
present duty, no matter what it be. I need not go into de- 
tails ; but, in order to be utterly true to the place in which 
they find themselves, they must forego this inviting path- 
way and that, and feel sometimes, perhaps, that their own 
lives are shrinking, dwarfed, poorer than they might have 
been, for lack of dew and sunshine and air. They have 
failed to unfold the finer, higher faculties of their souls. 
What shall we tell them ? Until the time comes when, with- 
out injury to any other soul, without unfaithfulness to that 
duty which seems to be placed by a higher power directly 



112 Life 

before them, they must stand, being true, at any rate, to 
the present duty, and trusting for what is to come. 

Do you not see, can you not gain a glimpse of, the great 
truth that, by being thus faithful to their own finer, higher 
selves, they are culturing and developing that which is most 
God-like in them, no matter at what loss ? I know such peo- 
ple, in whose presence I feel not only like taking off my hat 
with reverence, but I feel sometimes like bending my knee, 
knowing that by being at their feet I am on holy ground. 

No matter what the obstacle may be, we cannot gain any- 
thing by being false to the task that to-day is ours ; and, if 
we ever wish to reach any finer, higher position, is there any 
other way except that of culturing the finest, highest, truest, 
sweetest things in us, so that, when the path does open, we 
may step up into this higher place that we have mastered, 
with all that is best in us, with power with which to deal 
with the new circumstances, to accomplish the higher and 
finer results for which we have prepared ourselves ? 

What is the finest thing in a man or woman ? Is it not 
what they are ■? Is it not the soul, the spirit of love, of help- 
fulness ? and is it not true that all we can acquire of posi- 
tion, of surroundings, will at last be adjudged of importance 
only as we have been able to make them minister to the cul- 
tivation of what we are and become ? Overwhelm the archi- 
tect with materials, bury him under them, and he proves his 
ability as an architect only by his power to use them in the 
construction of some fine structure that is worthy of his 
genius. And so all our money, all our place, all our power 
of every kind, is only so much material intrusted to us ; and 
we succeed only as we convert these into soul-culture. 

And, then, the finest thing we can do, after we have become, 
is to help somebody else to the attainment of the same 
grand end ; and the meaning of our lives is to be found just 



My Life's Meaning 113 

here, and that meaning can be attained only by utter faith- 
fulness in the place where we are and to the next duty that 
lies at our hand. 

I do not mean that we should not reach out our hands, as 
we are engaged in this great struggle for soul attainment, to 
take what comfort, what cheer, what fellowship, what inspi- 
ration, what love we can attain, if so be that these things 
really help lift and do not hurt and degrade the soul. This is 
to be the criterion by which we are to measure the matter 
of indulgence. In this struggle I sometimes do not know 
which most to pity, the over-rich or the over-poor. There 
are peculiar temptations and almost equal dangers, perhaps, 
surrounding them both. The rich is so apt to feel the sense 
of responsibility loosening, to feel that he has attained, to 
say, I am rich and increased with goods, and have need of 
nothing, and to forget that possibly, in this higher sense of 
which I have spoken, he is all the while " poor and miserable 
and blind and naked." 

And the poor ? He is so apt to suffer from the opposite 
temptation, feeling that it is not worth while to try, so little 
can be accomplished. So little ! Friends, there is no com- 
parison of little or great here ; for what is it you are engaged 
in ? You are engaged in the building of a soul ; and there 
are no little souls or great souls, so far as this work or this 
possibility is concerned. And they who are faithful in ob- 
scurity, faithful when no one is overlooking, may find that 
they are working into the quality of their lives a finer grain 
than otherwise would be possible. The overseer of a great 
factory finds it easy to be faithful. He knows that promo- 
tion depends on that, that the stockholders and managers 
have their eye on him day by day, measuring him, and that 
according to that measure he will succeed. But how is it 
with the man at the bench, who is engaged on some mere 



1 14 Life 

fragment of the work, and who does not expect any promo- 
tion, but who is only trying to go from one weary day to an- 
other ? It is a great deal harder for a man like that to be 
faithful. But, if a man remembers that, no matter what his 
outward and ostensible occupation may be, what he is really 
doing is working on the soul, then there is no question of 
position, of high or low, but only a question as to whether 
you shall help discover the meaning of your own life and 
attain it. And, if we do not clearly see the way, still we 
need not doubt that there is a way. 

I wish to close this morning by calling your attention to 
an illustration with which, perhaps, you are familiar, but so 
beautiful, so fitting, that I know of no better way with which 
to round out my theme. 

It is said that the tapestry-weavers abroad work always 
upon what is called the wrong side of their task, looking at 
the pattern that is above them, but not seeing just what it is, 
or just how much they are accomplishing, working on thus 
blindly day by day, being merely faithful to the next tiny 
stitch to be taken in their work, having confidence in their 
overseer, and knowing that a failure in the least shall appear 
as a defect in the completed result. I believe that, in this 
matter of working out our own life's meaning, whatever the 
pattern may be, there is nothing finer or better that any soul 
can do than merely to take the next stitch as acccurately as 
may be in the light of what we believe to be the grand 
design. 

" Let us take to our hearts a lesson — no lesson can braver be — 
From the ways of the tapestry-weavers on the other side of the sea. 
Above their heads the pattern hangs ; they study it with care ; 
The while their ringers deftly weave, their eyes are fastened there. 
They tell this curious thing, besides, of the patient, plodding weaver, — 
He works on the wrong side evermore, but works for the right side ever. 



My Life's Meaning 115 

It is only when the weaver stops, and the web is loosed and turned, 
That he sees his real handiwork, — that his marvellous skill is learned. 
Ah ! the sight of its delicate beauty ! how it pays him for all it cost ! 
No rarer, daintier work than his was ever done by the frost. 
The years of man are Nature's looms, let down from the place of the sun, 
Wherein we are weaving alway, till the mystic web is done. 
Sometimes blindly ; but weaving surely, each for himself his fate ; 
We may not see how the right side looks : we must often weave and wait." 



A HUMAN LIFE. 



While attempting to outline for you this morning my idea 
of that which constitutes, in the highest and noblest sense 
of the word, a human life, I hope that you will not think 
of me as supposing for an instant that I myself have at- 
tained. I do not stand on some height above you, calling 
to you to come up where I am. I think that I see far off 
summits shining in God's eternal sunlight ; but I stand with 
you in the valley, and only ask you to climb with me, offer- 
ing to help you if I can, and asking you to help me if you 
will. It is a task which we ought to undertake together. 
My feet are as likely to become weary as are yours. My 
heart is as likely to be heavy and discouraged as yours; 
and sometimes, when the clouds settle and these summits 
disappear from view, I may be as likely as you to have 
hours of wondering as to whether, after all, they are real, 
whether they are not cloud forms that dissolve and fade, 
or, if they be real, whether it be worth all the pains to climb 
up to them, or whether they be really attainable with our 
ordinary human strength. I only attempt, then, to outline 
for you what I think is true in the higher realms of our com- 
mon human life ; what I think may be, and therefore what 
we ought to strive after. It is a common task set before 
us all. 

A human life, a life distinctively, peculiarly human, — how 






A Human Life 117 

shall we get at a conception of such a life ? Is it not true 
that we judge, and rightly, anything and everything in the 
light of that which is peculiar to itself, not in the light 
of what it shares with something else ? We judge it for 
what it is or what it may be ; and we value it as good or 
evil according as it realizes this ideal of what is peculiarly 
and distinctively its own. 

Let us lead up to our conception of what is peculiarly hu- 
man through some illustrations drawn from lower existences. 
Take this old planet of ours, — what is it that makes it just the 
earth it is ? Not the qualities and characteristics which this 
world shares with the other planets that make up the family 
circle about the sun. It is the differences, the peculiarities, 
which fit it to be the home of a race of beings that have 
climbed from some low region in the past to where they are 
to-day, and are reaching up to the attainment of something 
still beyond. It is these peculiar qualities and character- 
istics that make the earth the fit home of man. And, when 
we consider some of the individual features and facts of this 
earth, we are faced by the same simple and yet important 
truth. We judge the stones that we quarry by the peculiar 
qualities which make them what they are, as to whether they 
are fitted for the peculiar uses to which we design them. 
One stone, we say, is good for building purposes ; another 
is fit to carve into a statue ; another has some peculiar qual- 
ity of brilliancy that makes of it a gem. We judge each in 
the light of these peculiar qualities. We do not find fault 
with granite because it is not marble, nor with the marble 
because it is not granite, nor with either of them that it is 
not a diamond or an emerald or a ruby. We decide as to 
whether each one of them is good in the light of the peculiar 
characteristics which make it what it is, which adapt it to its 
special and peculiar use. 



n8 Life 

And so, when we come up to the animal world, or the 
forms of life beneath us, is it not the same ? A singing-bird 
we do not judge by its feathers. We do not raise the ques- 
tion as to its beauty, but as to the quality of its song. If 
we belonged to the old knightly days when with hawk on 
wrist we went out to engage in field sports, we should not 
have asked of the hawk that it should sing, only that 
it should be swift of wing and capable of overtaking its 
prey. So when we come up to the animal world. We 
judge the dog by its own peculiar qualities and character- 
istics. Is he a good watch-dog ? Then we do not raise the 
question of beauty. He is fitted for this peculiar office, and 
we judge him in the light of that. If, however, we wish 
a dog merely as a plaything, a pet, then we seek for other 
qualities, and decide whether he is good or bad in the light 
of these. We do not ask the horse to be as strong as the 
elephant or shaped like him. We ask only that he be fitted 
for the peculiar work that we require of him. And so, all 
the way up, you notice that the same things are true every- 
where. We judge all things, from the lowest to the highest, 
in the light of those qualities which constitute them what 
they are, and which fit them to be the highest and best of 
which they are capable. 

Let us come, with this principle as our measuring-rod, to 
estimate the qualities and peculiarities of man, and find 
what it is that makes a human being. I propose, in the first 
place and as leading up to the heights of my thought, to 
deal with some of the lower qualities and characteristics of 
man, — some of those that in more or less degree he shares 
with the world beneath him, — and see in what relation these 
stand to those higher qualities that make us what we are and 
what we are capable of becoming. 

In the first place, then, man, whatever else he may be, 



A Human Life 119 

whatever more, as I have had occasion to point out to you 
more than once, — man is an animal. He shares with the 
world beneath him so much of its life. And I believe we 
are not to cast contempt upon this lower life of ours ; for, 
if we do, it will certainly have revenge upon us, even in the 
highest realms of our being. We are animals ; and we ought, 
then, to be as perfect animals as possible. We ought to 
develop our physical characteristics to their highest, to keep 
ourselves in perfect physical condition, if we may. I do not 
share the ascetic idea, that has been so common in the relig- 
ions of the past, that these bodies are a sort of prison-house 
of the soul ; that they are to be treated with contempt, trod- 
den under foot ; that the end and object of life is to beat 
down the body or to break through its walls and escape. I 
do not believe that, because we are pent in these bodies, 
therefore intellectual and spiritual truth, the highest truth 
attainable by man, is made more difficult of attainment. I 
believe, rather, that in this stage of our development, at 
least, the body is as essential to us as is the soul, — the phys- 
ical part as the mental, the affectional, the moral, or the 
spiritual, — and that by as much as the physical is trained, 
cultured, kept at its best, by so much do we get clearer 
visions of the divine, and by so much is the divine which 
is in us made capable of culture, development, and expres- 
sion. Both religion and morals have been degraded in the 
past, because men have misconceived the relation of the 
physical to them. They have thought by contemning the 
body, by breaking down the physical life, by starving its 
natural aptitudes, tendencies, and tastes, they could exalt 
those things which they rightly recognized as being higher 
than the physical. They are higher than the physical, yet 
the physical is the pedestal on which they must rest ; and, 
unless the pedestal be sound, solid, and secure, that which 



120 Life 

rests upon it must fall into the dust and perhaps be broken 
in its fall. I believe, then, that every faculty of the physical 
ought to be developed to its highest efficiency. 

How about the indulgence of physical tastes, appetites, 
passions ? How about the exercise of all these physical 
peculiarities that belong to us as animals ? So far as they 
are healthful, so far as they are fight, so far as they do not 
injure our higher selves or the welfare of anybody else, I 
believe that we have a perfect right to all the pleasure that 
we can get out of this life here on earth as we are passing 
through it. Only we should remember that there is some- 
thing higher in us, that it is not the physical which consti- 
tutes us men, and see to it that through indulgence of the 
physical faculties, powers, and tastes, we do not injure or 
degrade that which makes us something more than physical. 
We need that these lower faculties of ours should be kept in 
perfect tune, in order that the higher may reach their grand- 
est manifestation. And we need also to curb and control 
and keep under the domination of reason and right all this 
lower side of us, lest the higher in us be injured and de- 
graded below that of which it is capable. 

The man who lives only in the body or for the body, who 
makes that the one great end of life, who seeks chiefly phys- 
ical comfort, physical enjoyments, no matter how refined, no 
matter how gentlemanly he may be in the pursuit of these 
things, no matter how carefully he may guard the question 
as to whether he injures the welfare of any other in the 
process, though he do no wrong positively, is not leading a 
human life. He who lives in the physical chiefly, however 
beautiful the life may be, is leading only an animal life, he 
has not yet climbed up into his manhood at all. 

Let us take a step higher, and come up into the range of 
the intellectual. What of the man who seeks to know, who 



A Human Life 121 

searches the world for truth, the man who disports himself 
in the fields of literature, the man who builds for himself 
palaces of art, halls of music, the man who lives in the 
higher ranges of the intellectual life, — has he attained to the 
human ? It depends entirely upon the spirit that animates 
him, the end that he has in view. I care not how many 
grand truths a man may discover and bestow upon the world, 
— he may in the bestowal of these truths be conferring benefit 
upon the earth, — but, if the conferring of the benefit be no 
part of his purpose, if his soul be not turned that way, making 
it one of the great aims and ends of his life, if he be seeking 
truth merely for the sake of selfish intellectual indulgence, 
if he be living in this intellectual realm ever so innocently, 
so far as any positive harm be wrought upon the world, still 
he is not leading what I mean by a human life. A man may 
be as selfish, as self-centred, as self-contained, in the world 
of intellect, as is the man who is buried in the world of mere 
sense, caring only for the gratification of his animal desires. 
There must be something more than merely the search for 
truth. A man may indeed discover truths which are impor- 
tant for the welfare of the world, like one who collects the 
waters of a thirsty region in a reservoir for his own amuse- 
ment, because he is interested in it, studying how it may 
be done, and yet keeping these waters in the reservoir, not 
making them minister to human welfare. A man may do all 
this, and yet be purely, intensely selfish in his occupation ; 
and so, however much benefit he may ultimately confer upon 
the world, after his control of these things has ceased, still 
the world would owe him no thanks, — for he who helps an- 
other without meaning to must not find fault if he receive 
no meed of gratitude even for his services. 

Come up higher still, — for it is higher, — to the afTectional 
nature. Is a man necessarily leading a human life because 



122 Life 

he is tender and true here ? Let a man build for himself 
a home which shall be an ideal home, a home concerning 
which no one can make just criticism. The outer structure, 
the inner decoration, the spirit, the atmosphere, shall be all 
that any one could dream of or demand, — one air of perfect 
love blowing like a breath of heaven through it all. And 
such a man may have his circle of friends outside his home, 
with whom he stands in intimate personal relations of love 
and tenderness and service. He may build himself a world 
like this, and live in it his life long, wholly untainted by any 
touch or breath of impurity, and yet lead a life of utter self- 
ishness, a life that rightly might be charged with being un- 
human, because he cares only for those who are closely 
linked with him by these personal and affectional associa- 
tions. The bear loves and will die for her cub. There are 
herds of wild animals that will fight even to the death for 
mutual self-defence. Until there is something in us higher 
and grander than that which we share with any of the lower 
forms of life, we cannot claim that we have climbed up into 
that which is human. 

I will go further yet. Let us go up into the realm of the 
spiritual. A man may devote himself with his whole soul, 
as he thinks, to his God, and yet do it in a way that, if not 
/whuman, is at least wzhuman ; for he falls beneath the meas- 
ure of that which is demanded of a human life. Is it not 
true that, in many of the religions of the past, men in what 
they have regarded as devotion to their souls have ruined 
their bodies, have blighted or perverted their intellectual 
natures, so as not to be capable of coming to the truth ? 
have warped their affectional natures, starving themselves 
here, starving those that look to them for comfort and help, 
leading unhuman lives, for the sake, as they supposed, of 
that which was highest in them, entertaining dishonoring and 






A Huma?i Life 123 

selfish views of God, and all, as they believed, for the sake of 
honoring the Divine ? If a man pursues the culture and 
development of his own soul merely for his own soul's sake, 
if he pursues it in such a way as to dwarf and blight the 
other characteristics of his own nature, if he pursues it in 
such a way as to lead him to neglect the services which as 
a man he owes to his fellows, then, however religious he 
may be in his own esteem, he falls short of attaining to that 
which can be called a human life. 

In the second sermon of this series, I went into some 
particulars in pointing out those qualities and characteristics 
which man has as man above and beyond any of those which 
he shares with the world beneath him. I need this morning 
to recur to some of these, although with a wholly different 
purpose from that which I then had in view. 

Let us consider, then, those things that are peculiar to 
man, so that we may get a clear idea as to what it means to 
lead a human life. I shall note only three of those which I 
touched on before, and treat them in a wholly different 
way. 

In the first place, man is a being who cannot, if he would, 
live alone. He cannot, if he would, attain the highest and 
best by means of his own hand, his own brain, his own heart, 
his own spirit. If to-day any one of us should go off by 
himself and try to lead a hermit existence, tired of or dis- 
gusted with his fellow-men, he would carry with him his body, 
his brain, his heart, his soul, all full and running over with 
gifts which he had received from his fellow-men. And, if 
you should take him after he has built his hermitage, and 
strip him of those things that he owes to his fellows, what 
would there be left ? The finest and highest qualities of 
his soul would be gone ; all the refinements, delicacies, and 
beauties of his affectional nature would be gone ; his power 



124 Life 

to think and all the accumulated knowledge of the world 
would be gone ; even the very complex and marvellous struct- 
ure of his brain, by means of which he does think, would be 
reduced to such small proportions as would place him on a 
level with the very lowest of the animal world. All his finest 
and highest physical characteristics would be gone. He 
would be only a skeleton, — of a man, — shall I say ? Hardly 
the skeleton of one of the higher animals. So much does 
he owe to his fellows. For all that is best in us we have 
wrought out not alone : we have wrought it out together. 

Man, then, is a being who finds his highest and best life 
in association with his fellow-men, in receiving from them 
and in giving to them. And, then, this fact has been born, — 
that the conscience, the moral nature, the sense of justice, 
all demand that what is good for us shall also be meted out 
so far as possible to every man who lives. 

Here, then, is the first quality, the first peculiarity to 
which I would call your attention as constituting man in the 
very highest sense. By as much, then, as you attempt to 
lead a selfish, sequestered life, by as much as you try to 
throw off your obligations to others, by as much as you at- 
tempt to ignore or deny the debt which you owe to the world, 
by as much as you try to lead a selfish life in any direction, 
— by so much do you throw away your birthright as a sharer 
in the grand common life, the grand common destiny of man. 

Here, then, is the first thing. You may lead your physical 
life, you may lead your intellectual life, your affectional life, 
your religious life, as fully, as grandly, as you will, but 
always subordinated to and made to minister to the welfare 
of this associated humanity of which you are a part. If you 
fail in this, by just so much you fail to grasp that which is 
human. 

Another point. I have often had occasion to tell you that 



A Human Life 125 

man, so far as we know, is the only being on earth who is 
gifted with the power of the ideal, — not only with the capac- 
ity of remembering, of looking back over what he was, of 
tracing the pathway of his development, but of being restless, 
of being dissatisfied, discontented, haunted by dreams, see- 
ing ever something in the intellectual world, in the moral, 
the spiritual, the physical, no matter where, which is as yet 
beyond his grasp. This is a quality which is peculiarly 
human. It means a desire to attain something better, to 
reach on to something ever luring, ever eluding. And I do 
not expect to sit down even in heaven satisfied. Unless we 
cease to be the children of an infinite God, there will always 
be a thirst for the infinite in our finite lives ; and we shall 
ever find ourselves striving towards the attainment of some- 
thing still beyond. 

Another quality, and the last one on which I shall dwell 
this morning, akin to this and springing out of it, yet some- 
thing entirely different, something even higher and finer, is 
that of which many a man and many a woman in this nine- 
teenth century is ashamed, — that quality which makes us 
worshippers. People sometimes speak lightly, slightingly, of 
worship, as though it were a stoop of the soul, as though it 
were humiliating to bend the knee, as though there were 
something not quite manly in the attitude. 

The old Greeks named man anthropos, the upward looker. 
It is only by virtue of the fact that we do look up in admira- 
tion, in worship, of something recognized as higher than we 
that we are distinctively and peculiarly human. By as much 
as a man worships, by so much is he great. You can tell the 
quality of a man by his admirations, if you can discover 
what they are. What does he love ? What does he admire ? 
What does he worship ? For no man can worship a thing 
except in so far as there is something in himself which 



126 Life 

answers to this quality. If, then, a man worships something 
higher than himself, it means the power, the potency, the 
promise, in himself of becoming that. As the old poet 

Daniel has said, — 

" Unless above himself he can 
Erect himself, how poor a thing is man ! " 

Or as Tennyson has said, this time in regard to prayer, 
but that kind of prayer the heart of which is essentially 
worship : — 

" For what are men better than sheep or goats 
That nourish a blind life within the brain, 
If, knowing God, they lift not hands of prayer 
Both for themselves and those who call them friend ? 
For so the whole round earth is every way 
Bound by gold chains about the feet of God." 

It is this quality in us that makes us worship something 
higher, and, while we look up, reach out our hands and try 
to embrace all we love and lift them with us to the same 
adoration. It is this that makes us capable of ever growing 
into something that is higher, finer, better. 

Here, then, it seems to me, we find the key of that which 
is the distinctive, peculiar, human life, — the life that conse- 
crates itself to the general good, that cannot be happy in the 
midst of the general unhappiness, that can say, as the old 
Hindu prayer has it, Even if the opportunity offer, we can- 
not enter into peace alone. Then comes the ideal, personal 
and general, of something better than has yet been attained, 
that looks up and on. Then, worship, admiration, the im- 
pulse and motive force for climbing. Here is that which is 
grandly human. 

And, now, I care not how complete your life may be on the 
lower levels. They need, indeed, to be complete there ; 
and you need the higher culture and development ; you need 



A Human Life 127 

• 
the cultivated mind for the discovery of truth ; you need the 
warm, tender, affectionate life in the midst of family and 
friends ; you need this devotion to that which is spiritual, — 
all these, but all these subordinated to general ends, and 
lifted into this higher realm and made a part of this grander 
universal life. 

Now, is a life like this possible ? " To some," you are 
ready to say, "yes." Is it possible to you? Is it possible 
to me ? If it were not, there would be no duty attached to 
it. I believe that we make a great mistake in supposing 
that we must get free from all hampering associations, free 
from all burdens, or have a world that would just suit us in 
every way, before we can ever gain or lead the ideal human 
life. It is not needful that this should be. 

The carpenter at his bench may do his work while always 
in his brain and his heart cherishing the wider outlook and 
trying to make that which is commonplace to him a part at 
last of the large, good, healthful human life which is the 
promise of the world. It does not make any difference 
what position we occupy, what place we are in, what gifts we 
are endowed with : it is the loving spirit, the purpose of the 
heart, the soul, which is the chief thing. We can halo the com- 
monest task by this light of the ideal, — the light that " never 
was on sea or land." Indeed, we should fail of our grand 
purpose if we neglected the common duty of the hour. This 
common task must be fulfilled, but fulfilled in the spirit of a 
son or daughter of God, as a part of the great life-task of 
the world. Suppose our circumstances are such that we 
feel it practically impossible to link ourselves in any way 
with some of these grand universal measures, — the great 
movements that promise to lift and help the world. Suppose 
we think it impossible for us to enter into this larger life, 
that we are tied down day after day to petty, common tasks, 



128 Life 

that we have neither the heart nor the strength nor the time 
for them. Remember, friends, one little tiny word of Brown- 
ing's,— 

" What I aspired to be, 
But was not, comforts me." 

The wish, the purpose, the aspiration, — these, though seem- 
ingly light as air, do yet become a part of that great common 
impulse which is the very heave and lift of the Almighty in 
lifting the world into a clearer light and a higher air. So 
that in spirit, in purpose, and, as far as possible, in action, 
we may become a part of this great common life, and so 
share at last the great common triumph. 



WORK AND PLAY. 



A commonplace theme is this, and in some respects I 
shall treat it in a commonplace way. I need, however, to 
consider some of the principles involved as a preparation for 
the themes which are to follow. Perhaps because the sub- 
ject is a commonplace one people are not apt to note care- 
fully enough the underlying principles, the meaning of these 
things to which they are accustomed. 

The difference between work and play is not a difference 
that consists in the activities engaged in, or the faculties that 
are used, or the stress, the power, with which these faculties 
are used. The difference is almost entirely one of aim, one 
of motive. Work is that which is done for the sake of some 
ulterior object, either as touching the question of develop- 
ment or the production of some object desired; while play, 
although it may exercise substantially the same faculties, and 
exercise them quite as strongly, is such an activity as is 
engaged in for its own sake, as we say, or for the sake of the 
mere pleasure involved. A man will start out on a walk of 
five or six miles for the pleasure of the walk or because he 
is tired of his office. He will expand his lungs and take in 
the fresh air, rejoicing in every sight and sound of nature, 
and feel himself refreshed from it all, counting it play, when 
perhaps another time, if you should ask him to take pre- 
cisely the same walk, with no more effort involved, he would 



130 Life 

look upon it as a wearisome burden, as a piece of work from 
which he would shrink if he could. Children are constantly 
doing things "for the fun of it," as they say, that involve 
much more effort than those things that they dread and 
shrink from as tasks. 

The story is told — I think I referred to it some years ago, 
but it illustrates my point admirably — that a school-teacher 
on a Saturday afternoon took a whole band of boys out into 
the fields for study and observation. They were so inter- 
ested that they lost all sense of time and distance ; and, 
when they turned to go home, he found that the children 
were so weary that they were ready to break down and cry 
at the thought of the task before them. It occurred to him 
to turn the trip home into play; and he set the boys to 
cutting sticks and switches which they were to mount and 
ride as hobby-horses, and they went laughing and happy all 
the way home, because they had turned their task into play. 

This illustrates the point that work is not essentially the 
putting forth of effort ; that play is not the absence of effort. 
I have known a man to play chess for sixteen long hours on 
a stretch, so absorbed, so interested in the game that he had 
forgotten that it was work. If, however, you had put him to 
a precisely similar task sixteen hours long, in which there 
was no interest on its own account, in which he could take 
no personal pleasure, he would have considered that he was 
being tyrannized over in the most uncomfortable way. Work 
and play, then, do not differ so far as the processes are con- 
cerned, but according as the end in view is one of self-cult- 
ure and development, or the creation of something that does 
not already exist, or whether it is simply for its own sake, 
for the pleasure of the exercise of the faculties that are 
involved. 

Men have always shrunk from work. That is not contra- 



Work and Play 131 

dieted by the well-known fact that a man can become so 
habituated to his task, after long years, as to find home and 
peace nowhere else. There are stories on record of men 
who have been kept in prison for thirty or forty years, until 
they had become so habituated to it that, after they were set 
free, they have come back and begged to be admitted to 
their old quarters again. They had lost the ability to feel 
at home in any other conditions. So men, after working at 
a particular task, or profession, for twenty, thirty, forty years, 
become so habituated to that, they have run their lives so 
completely into this one mould, that there is no peace, no 
rest, for them anywhere else ; and so they come, as they say, 
to love their work, their task. 

But, in spite of this, men do not love work. Men do not 
naturally take to it. And men have ever been driven on to 
their tasks as if they were slaves by some sort of necessity, 
or else by the spur of the motive, or the desire to attain 
some end that could not be reached in any other way. So 
it is not strange that the first dream of the world as to a 
perfect condition was a garden where there should be no 
work involved, where practically everything that a man 
might want should spring up at his hand. It is not strange 
that poets like Tennyson should sing of the lotus-eaters' 
vision, a paradise where all things should be like a summer 
afternoon, where all effort and toil should be outgrown and 
complete rest attained. It is not strange that men, weary 
with tasks, should look forward to heaven as a place of 
eternal rest. And yet, as we stop to look at it a moment, 
we are perfectly well aware that eternal rest would be un- 
bearable. The dream, however, I say, is quite natural, be- 
cause we do not take easily to the performance of tasks that 
involve effort and that leave us weary when the effort is 
over. 



132 Life 

And yet, though men dream these dreams of everlasting 
peace, where all wants are supplied without toil, where there 
is no dreary drudgery and all may do as they please, — yet, as 
we stop to contemplate the picture a moment, we find that 
this, after all, is a condition of barbarism. There are para- 
dises to-day, plenty of them, on this poor old planet. There 
are lands, there are islands in the sea, where the inhabi- 
tants need not work; where the climate is such that they 
need very little protection against the cold, where they need 
neither houses nor clothing, except of the most primitive and 
simple kind ; where the soil naturally and bounteously pro- 
duces whatsoever is absolutely necessary to supply their 
physical wants ; so that they are gardens of Eden. Only the 
inhabitants have always been and always must be barbaric. 
Adam himself, if you picture the man that the old legend 
tells us about, was a barbarian pure and simple, an animal, 
utterly ignorant, utterly inexperienced, knowing not even the 
distinction between good and evil, unclothed, with no men- 
tal, moral, spiritual wants whatever ; and, though he had had 
them to an unlimited extent, with nothing whatever in his 
entire surroundings in any way fitted to feed the higher 
mental, moral, or spiritual faculties of his being. All these 
dreams, then, of gardens of Eden, of lotus-eaters' lands, are 
dreams of animalism, dreams of barbarism. 

I remember, when a boy, that I read a book which fasci- 
nated me very much. I have wished many a time, for these 
many years past, that I could find that book again ; and yet 
I do not know even how to search for it, for I have entirely 
forgotten title, publisher, and all the particulars that would 
enable me to succeed in such a quest. It was a fairy story, 
but with a modern lesson. It related how a man desired to 
develop himself into mastery over his fellow-men and to 
acquire power to create more beautiful and grander con* 



Work and Play 133 

ditions in the world. He was told that he might learn this 
secret on condition that he would rise every day early in the 
morning, dress himself in coarse and stout clothing, and go 
out doors ; and it was told him that he should meet a fairy 
who would teach him the secret of developing himself into 
the mastery of men and the power to re-create the world, and 
the story tells of his success. It was a thin and transparent 
allegory of the power of labor. Work is the great fairy that 
cultivates and develops the individual and gives him con- 
trol of all his conditions. 

" Paradise Lost " closes with one of the most pathetic little 
pictures that I know of in all the world, — Adam and Eve 
doomed to turn their back on Eden, going " hand in hand, 
with wandering step and slow," out into the wild, waste 
world. If there ever was such a journey as this taken by 
our human ancestors, it was the most fortunate, the most 
blessed journey ever undertaken in all the history of man ; 
for labor is not a curse, — it is the one prime blessing. Think 
what depends on it. 

In the first place, work is absolutely essential to self- 
culture, development, growth. It is work, and only work, 
that has transformed the animal into man. It has taken the 
primeval savage of the woods and given us Shakspere, 
Michel Angelo, Jesus, all the noble and great of the world. 
It is only work that has transformed the barbarian into civil- 
ized man. Physical culture is dependent upon it. Mental 
culture, moral culture, spiritual culture, are dependent on it. 
It is only through work that the eye can be trained to the 
discernment of hundreds of colors and shades that we do not 
naturally see. It is only by work that the ear is made capa- 
ble of hearing finer distinctions of sound ; and it is only 
when I can hear all these finer distinctions that sound is 
transformed into music. What is it that enables a man 



134 Life 

not merely to listen to a noise, but to hear a symphony? 
It means years, ages, of training on the part of the race in 
the first place ; and then it means years of special cultivation 
on the part of the individual before he becomes capable of 
grasping the meaning of the master. You could not give a 
man one of Beethoven's symphonies on any other condition 
than a long preparation of toil on his part. All the angels 
in heaven could not introduce to a soul the meaning of 
music like this except by leading that soul's feet up the toil- 
worn pathway of effort and labor. God himself would find 
the task a contradiction and an absurdity. God cannot give 
us his highest and finest things except as we become pre- 
pared for them ; and that preparation means work. Toil on 
our part gives this ability; toil on our part develops the 
open faculty and gives the soul hands with which it can 
reach out and take the mighty gifts of Heaven. 

And then, on the other hand, of course it is apparent, it 
requires no argument, it is only as the result of toil that the 
world has been changed from a wilderness to a civilized 
land. Not one single item of that long list of inventions, 
improvements, advances, which have lifted man above the 
level of the brute and made him powerful over the forces of 
nature, — not one item of all this list that has not been 
attained as the result of human labor. Work, then, a curse? 
It is the whitest, most shining angel that God ever sent with 
a message of peace and hope and happiness for man. 

And yet work* is not all good. Too much work, instead of 
lifting a man out of barbarism, crushes him down into it 
deeper still, and makes it impossible for him to rise. Con- 
sider what I mean. 

Work, in the broad sense in which I have been speaking 
of it, includes the training and the exercise of all the higher 
human faculties and capabilities of the race. The great 



Work and Play 135 

majority of the world, the mass of men, except those that I 
have referred to as living in a climate that calls for no effort, — 
the great mass of men, I say, is held down under a necessity 
of a certain kind, a quantity of labor that makes it practi- 
cally impossible for them to rise in the scale of human life. 
If a man is obliged to work all his working hours, every day, 
every week, every month the year round, simply for the sake 
of getting bread, clothes, shelter for himself and those de- 
pendent on him, do you not see that anything like the 
highest kinds of work, on which the development of his 
higher nature depends, becomes practically impossible to 
him ? There must be some time, some leisure, and oppor- 
tunity. A man who must work all the time for the satisfac- 
tion of his animal wants is only an animal. He has no 
opportunity to be anything else. There must, then, be some 
way found for gradual release of these bonds, now in this 
case, now in that, before the stragglers on the world's great 
march of civilization can come up with the main body of 
those who have lifted themselves at least a little way out of 
this kind of necessity for continual physical toil. 

It is sometimes said, by way of argument in favor of the 
present condition of things, when one sees an attempt made 
to have shorter hours of labor, — I am not discussing that 
question now, mark you, either for or against it, — whether 
wisely or unwisely, that, if it were possible for these work- 
men to get shorter hours, one might question the wisdom of 
it for them, because they would throw away their money 
every week when they were released ; that, if they have 
certain hours free, they are sure to waste their money in dis- 
sipation, sure to injure themselves instead of bettering them- 
selves by this enlargement of liberty. Granted. Why not ? 
How can you expect anything else ? You say, if you let a 
little boy have an edge tool, he is in danger of cutting him- 



136 Life 

self. Of course he is. But, if you do not let him have an 
edge tool, he is in more serious danger, — the danger of never 
knowing how to use edge tools or to use his hands. I grant 
you that these laborers when suddenly released are apt to 
make a poor use of their time and pay ; but, if they are not 
released, they will never learn how to make a human use 
either of time or money. They must be trusted with that 
same liberty with which we trust ourselves, because there is 
no possibility of the development of humanity except through 
the use of our faculties unconstrained. Give men the liberty 
to learn the natural, essential laws of life, of culture, of devel- 
opment, and they will become men after a while. But shut 
them up, and they never may become men. They may not 
do so much positive evil at first ; but they will never become 
capable of positive good. There must, then, be the liberty 
to acquire somehow if the world is to become civilized. 

I have one other point I wish to refer to in regard to this 
matter of work. I think in a sermon that I preached several 
years ago I touched on a similar idea, but with another pur- 
pose in view. Mr. Emerson once said that, if it had not 
been for the accident of the Pilgrims having drifted to the 
shores of Massachusetts, New England would probably never 
have been settled, so frowning is her sky, so inhospitable her 
soil. Our forefathers came from a country where there had 
been a revolt against vicious amusements on the part of the 
people ; and they came to a land where they were com- 
pelled to work severely to overcome the obstacles which 
opposed their success. As the result, there is a strain in the 
New England blood that leads us to exalt work as a sort of 
deity, to make it a little god to be worshipped, regarding it 
as a good thing for its own sake. This matter is carried so 
far that you can find men boasting of the fact that they have 
done a wonderful quantity of work, although they may have 



Work and Play 137 

injured themselves in the process. You find men boasting 
that they have not taken a vacation for years. Now, if a 
man has been so situated that he could not take a vacation 
for years, and he wants my sympathy, he can have it. But, 
if he asks me to admire him for a voluntary self-immolation 
of that sort, I must respectfully decline. I have no admira- 
tion for anything of the sort. Work looked at simply for its 
own sake is not worth a whit more than play. Work is 
worth the outcome of work ; and work is good only when 
one needs to toil for his own sake or for the sake of hu- 
manity. 

I ask you to turn with me for a moment to consider the 
question of play. When may a man play ? How much may 
he play ? The answer seems very simple. A man may play 
when he has earned the right to play ; and he may play as 
much as is needed to bring him into and keep him in good 
condition, provided he can get the time and opportunity for 
it rightly. 

There are two kinds of play. One is dissipation. It dis- 
sipates, it scatters energy, faculty, power j leaves a man 
less capable than he was before. I saw the humorous side 
of this touched on in a paper within a year. A man had 
been off on his vacation for a week, and came back looking 
heartily worn out and ill, when a friend asked him what he 
had been doing that should make him look so badly. He 
replied that he had been on his vacation, and was all tired 
out, but that he should be rested after he had been at work 
a few days. A great many take their vacation in that fashion, 
and it leaves them worn and dissipated. 

The other kind of play — divide the word a little differ- 
ently, and you will see its meaning — is re-creation, — play 
which re-creates, which adds to faculty, which makes one 
more capable of work. It leaves one with a fresh zest for 



138 Life 

his task and in better shape for its performance than he was 
before. This is the true kind of play. I said that all work 
tended to brutalize, to degrade humanity. Precisely the 
same thing is true, only in another way, of all play. I heard 
a young man say within a year, asking the question concern- 
ing another young man whose father was rich : If he doesn't 
need to work, why should he ? His father is rich, and he 
does not need to work. He has money enough, or is going 
to inherit enough, to live on the rest of his life. If, then, he 
does not need to work, why should he ? 

For two reasons. In the first place, as I have already 
pointed out to you, and argued at some length, he should 
work to make himself a man ; for work is absolutely essential 
to the culture of any high, fine faculties in us. And you, 
fathers and mothers, are going to make a mistake who think 
that you are doing your children a favor by setting them free 
from the necessity of doing anything, if you are bringing them 
up with the idea that they need not toil because their father 
has toiled before them. Think of the absurdity of it. 
Could you learn by hours and days and weeks of practice to 
play the piano for your son or your daughter ? You might, 
indeed, by the cultivation of your own musical faculty, by 
creating an atmosphere favorable to the development of 
musical genius, make it easier for your child ; but this is a 
sort of thing that never can be done for another. If you 
teach your boy that he need not do anything because he can 
fall back on this source of supply, you are doing him the 
worst possible kind of harm, because you are taking away 
the spur that would goad him on to manhood. 

There is another reason. I have touched on this before ; 
but I cannot touch on it too often. Perhaps you are aware 
of the fact that the world lives from hand to mouth. It is on 
the verge of starvation all the time. If no work should be 



Work and Play 139 

done in the world, all the people would be dead inside of 
two or three years ; for there would be nothing more left 
to live on. We are creating constantly as we go on the 
means of our subsistence. What do you think, then, of the 
question ? 

You will recall the lesson that I read this morning, and 
that I said the word " steal " would come to have a larger 
significance than it has now. What do you think of the man 
who simply goes on year after year using up the small store 
of the world's accumulated means for living, and never add- 
ing to it by one single grain ? I believe that, when the 
standard of moral living shall be higher than it is to-day, 
this sort of thing will be looked upon as theft. No matter 
how you have come into the possession of your means, you 
owe the ability to have come into such possession to human- 
ity. You have no exclusive right, then, to this which has 
been produced, in the sense that you can go on ad libitum 
taking away from the little pile, and leaving the world nearer 
to the starvation point and adding not one thing to the ac- 
cumulated good. This is the great indictment that I would 
bring against the man who simply lives by his wits and the 
man who lives only for his own self-indulgence on the money 
that his ancestors have accumulated. I would bring this 
charge, as did Matthew Arnold, against the men of the no- 
bility of England and in Europe. 

A year and a half ago, when I was in Vienna, I was talk- 
ing with an old gentleman about the brother of the Emperor 
of Austria. I said, What sort of man is he ? He shrugged 
his shoulders and lifted his eyebrows, I said, What does he 
do ? He named over almost all the conceivable vices that 
you can think of, and said that he spent his time exclusively 
in those and in wasting the people's money. The time will 
come when the man who steals a loaf of bread at the street 



140 Life 

corner to save himself or his family from starvation will be 
regarded as saintly, when held up against the background 
of that kind of prince. Any man who is willing to walk 
through this world, taking out of it all the time and put- 
ting nothing into the common stock, comes short of the 
ideal of what it means to lead a noble human life, to use 
the very mildest of terms concerning him. All play, then, 
barbarizes as much as all work brutalizes. 

What, then, is the ideal ? Were I not to follow this dis- 
course by others, it would be natural for me here to raise 
questions as to what work is profitable, what kind of work 
people ought to engage in, what products are really valuable, 
what is the standard of value, and also as to whether there 
is any power outside the individual initiative that has the 
wisdom or the right to decide who shall work, or in what de- 
partment, or how many hours, and all these kindred subjects. 
I pass them by, however, this morning. They will naturally 
come up for discussion in one of the two following sermons. 
I need only say this morning that the ideal to which the 
world is looking, and towards which we ought to be working 
all the time, is such a condition of affairs, if it can be at- 
tained, as shall give all men enough to do, not too much, not 
place upon them a crushing burden, but giving with toil 
enough time for self-culture, for self-development ; that shall 
create such a condition of things as shall leave the individ- 
ual free, so far as possible, to choose those things that he 
loves and so again to do the best he can, for we never do 
good work unless we love it; that shall enable people to 
choose such tasks as those into which they can put a little of 
brain, a little of heart, a little of imagination, as well as mus- 
cle ; that shall leave people free enough so that they can get 
such recreation as they need in order to fit them for the 
proper accomplishment of their tasks. This manifestly is 



Work and Play 141 

the ideal towards which the world is looking, wisely or un- 
wisely, and which it is trying ever and ever to attain. 

And what does this mean ? It means that neither work 
nor play is to be regarded as the end of life. What is the 
end of life ? Simply living ; life first as continued existence, 
and then, philosophically speaking, as content; life as holding 
— what? Satisfaction, joys, pleasures, the things that we 
desire. Life, then, is the end and aim, the ideal, — long life, 
full life. And both work and play are to be judged only as 
they contribute to this. 



WEALTH AND POVERTY. 



What is wealth? The accumulated product of labor, 
a great many people would reply ; and this is a part of the 
truth ; or they would say the accumulated joint product of 
labor and capital ; and, again, this is a part of the truth, but 
not all. A man, for example, in California might stumble 
on to a gold mine, not as yet worked or owned by anybody, 
and suddenly find himself worth hundreds of thousands of 
dollars. In his case, that may be neither the result of labor 
nor of applied capital ; but purely by the result of accident 
he has come into possession of something that is looked 
upon as very valuable, and which he can exchange for what- 
soever he may desire. 

The application of labor does not always produce wealth, 
nor does the application of capital. It might take as much 
labor and as much capital to raise worthless rock to the 
surface of the earth as it would to lift out the most valuable 
quartz from a gold mine. Or a certain quantity of capital 
is used, a certain quantity of labor is expended, and the 
production is wealth. Or sometimes, as I have already 
intimated, the wealth comes into the possession of the man 
or the community without the expenditure of either labor 
or capital in any commensurate degree to the amount of 
wealth. A man might come into possession of a lot of 
land, he might take it, as in a case that I happened to 



Wealth and Poverty 143 

know of, because he had lent money to a friend and had 
received a mortgage as the only thing the friend had in the 
way of security, while neither he nor his friend regarded 
the mortgage as of any adequate value. And yet the rise 
of property in the town after a few years made the person 
who was obliged to take the land on this mortgage exceed- 
ingly wealthy. One might hold a piece of land where 
a new city is springing up ; he might have taken it up while 
it was still wild land, and have expended no labor on it, 
have applied no capital, or very little, at any rate, after 
its coming into his possession, and yet after a course of 
years find himself immensely wealthy. Labor and capital 
must indeed indirectly enter into this result, the labor and 
capital of other people, but not necessarily very much 
of either labor or capital on his part. 

Wealth, then, what is it ? Here is a simpler definition : 
it is an accumulation of objects of human desire. For the 
measure of value is nothing else than the fact that the thing 
possessed is looked on as having the quality of being what 
a great many people desire. No matter whether the desire 
is wise or unwise : the simple fact that a great number of 
people desire to possess a certain thing determines the fact 
that it shall be regarded as wealth. It is wealth, because 
it can be exchanged for anything that a man may wish in 
return for it. 

If, for example, all men should suddenly lose all desire 
to possess gold, if nobody wanted gold any more, it would 
be worth no more than pebble stones. 

Again, you will see, as resulting from this definition, that 
the most valuable things are those which the largest numbers 
of people desire, and which are the least in quantity. Take 
as an extreme illustration Raphael's Sistine Madonna, which 
is probably as valuable a painting as there is in the world, 



144 Life 

perhaps the most valuable painting. So valuable is it that 
it becomes a question of national contest, not personal, as 
to who shall possess it. Probably to-day there is not money 
enough that any nation would be induced to offer for it that 
could procure its removal from its present position. Great 
paintings have possessed such value that they have become 
matters of diplomatic intercourse between nations. The 
first Napoleon, for example, seized by force certain works 
of art from the great nations ; and after his fall, by the gen- 
eral consent of the nations involved, they were returned to 
their owners, as indicating that they were so valuable that 
no man had a right, even by conquest, to take them away. 
If nobody wanted the Sistine Madonna, if nobody appre- 
ciated its beauty or the genius expended on its production, 
it would suddenly lose all value, and any one could have it 
who chose to carry it away. 

The underlying principle, then, that determines the worth 
of anything is this fact of human desire. If you analyze 
this, it is only a modification of the great fundamental fact 
of hunger. A man desires food for the life of his body. 
He desires, or hungers, for clothing, either to protect him- 
self from the cold or as a matter of taste and beauty. He 
desires shelter, to satisfy this hunger for protection, from 
the weather in the first instance, and then to satisfy the 
higher aesthetic hunger, taste for beauty of form and of 
decoration. And so you may run the analysis from the 
lowest physical hunger up to the highest spiritual aspira- 
tion \ and that which people hunger for, for the supply of 
any want of any range or degree of intensity, becomes a 
matter of value as worth, as wealth. We do not call those 
things wealth which are consumed as we go along. We use 
the term rather of those objects of human desire which are 
accumulated beyond the immediate necessity of the owner. 



Wealth and Poverty 145 

We are now ready to raise the next questions. Is wealth 
desirable ? Is poverty a blessed condition ? Would it be 
better if the world were neither rich nor poor, if there were 
no poor people, if there were no rich people, if everybody 
possessed, as Tolstoi seems to desire, just enough to sup- 
ply the ordinary wants of the human animal ? Would that 
be a desirable condition for human society ? 

It seems to me most certainly not. For wealth, some 
accumulated value beyond that which is needed for the 
immediate necessities of the community, is the very condi- 
tion of all higher growth. Picture to yourselves, if you 
please, a world in which there is neither poverty nor riches ; 
in which every man, woman and child has shelter from the 
cold, clothing enough for decency, food enough to supply 
the ordinary calls of hunger, and so is comfortable ; a world 
in which no one is harassed by any anxiety as to what 
he is going to eat or drink or wear to-morrow or next year. 
Would this be a desirable condition of the world ? So far, 
yes. But if there were not more than that, if there were 
only enough wealth in the world to give all people physical 
shelter, physical clothing, physical food, then we might be 
for the next dozen centuries comfortable, well-fed animals ; 
but we could be nothing more than that. 

I said a few minutes ago that this analogy with hunger 
might be run all the way from the lowest physical desire for 
food clear up to the highest spiritual aspiration. Now, if 
these higher hungers are, in the first place, going to exist, 
and if they are going to be fed, so that men can grow above 
the level of comfortable animals, then there must be in the 
hands of somebody sufficient accumulation of wealth to pro- 
vide food for these higher hungers. If men are to think, if 
they are to read books, if they are to study, if they are to 
travel, so as to learn something about other parts of the world, 



146 Life 

if they are to have social intercourse with each other, they 
must, some of them, at any rate, be free from this grinding 
fact of toil to the end of simply supplying their animal wants. 
There must be somebody to write books if people are to read 
them ; and a man who is writing a book must have wealth 
enough so that he is set free for at least a part of the time 
from the necessity of working merely to supply his animal 
wants. He must have time, he must have something to eat, 
something to wear, some shelter while he is writing his book. 
If a man is to paint a picture, — if you want pictures, — he 
must be released from the necessity of merely earning his 
bread, so that he may have time to paint the picture. So 
with every work of art. If a man is to cultivate the spiritual, 
the moral side of human nature, either his own or some- 
body's else, if he is to minister to these higher, loftier ranges 
of human being, he must have time, he must be able to 
think, he must be able to cultivate these higher faculties for 
his own sake. He must be released from that toil which 
merely gives him bread and clothes and shelter. He must 
at least be sufficiently released so that he can do his higher 
work. And one thing we need to remember is that this work 
is anything but a selfish work. These higher labors, in the 
main, are engaged in for the benefit of all the world. And 
we must remember, also, that it is the poorest possible social 
economy to keep a man who is capable of doing these 
higher, grander things engaged all the hours of the day, 
every day of his life, merely in keeping himself alive. If you 
want these things, you must set somebody free. 

Now, the condition of all these higher things is, as you 
will readily see, that there shall be accumulated wealth, 
wealth more than is necessary simply to supply the wants of 
every day. 

Now, then, how shall these higher ends be attained ? That 



Wealth and Poverty 147 

is, when wealth is accumulated, who shall own it ? Who shall 
dispense it ? Who shall use it ? Here comes in the great 
contest with which I shall deal next Sunday between public 
ownership and private ownership. 

Before we can answer the question as to who really owns 
the wealth that is accumulated in the world to-day, another 
question must be asked : Who has produced it ? And, though 
we grant at present the fact of private ownership, we must 
not lightly assume that the man who to-day happens to be 
in possession of wealth is the man who has produced it. I 
do not now refer to any dishonest ways of coming into pos- 
session of it. Of course, everybody grants that the man 
who has stolen it or by any kind of knavery or indirection 
has come into the possession of wealth that he did not create 
is not the rightful owner of it. Every one grants that he is 
not the wealth-producer at all. He may be only a wealth- 
waster. 

But let us now turn from this, and consider the case of the 
man who has really created wealth, more than he needs, 
more than he cares to use, so that we speak of him as a rich 
man. Consider him as a man who is thoroughly honest in 
every fibre of his being, who has consciously wronged no 
man. How large a part of his wealth does he really, per- 
sonally own, in the sense that he has a right to do with it 
precisely as he pleases ? And here we need to note, — and, 
if we are not socialists, we shall fight socialism all the better 
for being just to it, — we need to recognize that wealth is 
never a personal, isolated, individual fact. It is always a 
social fact. Suppose Robinson Crusoe had discovered a 
gold mine or even a diamond mine on his island, would he 
have been rich ? Some cast-off clothing left there by a pass- 
ing ship would have been worth more to him. A few broken 
planks, timbers, or boards cast on shore by the waves would 



148 Life 

have been wealth to him in a sense that would not have ap- 
plied to the gold or the diamonds. A man standing alone 
can never be rich. And this, in the true sense of the word, 
is so, even if he live in a civilized community. I remember 
a man in my old town when I was a boy, — a hermit, a de- 
formed man, a curiosity to all of us children. I used to see 
him on the street once in a while. He was a wool-grower, 
and his house was piled high with wool. Every spare space 
was full with wool that he was accumulating and holding 
merely because he could not get the price for it that he de- 
sired. Was he rich ? If he was not going to exchange this 
for something else, use it for some public purpose or public 
end, he might as well have filled his house with sand. A 
man like that is not rich. A man, then, who stands alone 
never is rich and never can be ; for wealth is a social thing, 
the social factor in which is the matter of exchange, the 
public use of these accumulations. No man ever yet made 
money alone. He needs the assistance of society. You 
may trace this matter clear to the beginning, and the prin- 
ciple holds all the way through. As I have had occasion to 
tell you before, my hands, my brain, whatever I am in the 
way of faculty or capacity, is a gift. It has come to me from 
this toiling, struggling humanity. 

And, then, who created your commercial conditions ? The 
men who, beginning with a tree dug out for a boat, ended at 
last in the magnificent steamers that cross the ocean in six 
days ; the men that have explored the world ; the men that 
have lifted up civilization, that have created the thousands 
and millions of wants in the farthest ends of the planet, so 
that the things you now create can be exchanged for other 
things that you desire. It is humanity through its entire his- 
tory, from the beginning until to-day, that has conferred 
upon every rich man not only the faculty and power by which 



We alt J i and Poverty 149 

to accumulate wealth, but the conditions that make those ac- 
cumulations possible. So wealth is a social thing. It is not 
something that you did. You did it with the help of all the 
world, and you could not have done it without that help. 

Who owns wealth, then ? The rich man and humanity 
own it, not the rich man alone. 

But that does not settle the question as to who shall hold 
the title-deeds, as to who shall dispense wealth and use it. 
This is entirely another question. We all of us grant the 
principle of socialism some time in our lives. You pay a tax ; 
you submit to the process of law, of government, of organ- 
ized society, that puts its hand in your pocket to take out a 
certain fraction of your wealth for public uses. Every time 
you submit to this, you admit the right of society to do this 
in exchange for what society is doing for you and for every- 
body else. You submit to a draft in time of war, and thereby 
acknowledge the principle that the welfare of the whole is 
more important than the welfare of any single person. 

We admit, then, the fundamental principle of socialism ; 
but the question as to whether the property that has been 
accumulated by these men whom we call rich shall inhere in 
their hands, whether they shall hold the title-deeds, whether 
they shall be free to use it as they please during their life- 
time and to bequeath it to public institutions or to their chil- 
dren, — these are matters of public expediency, pure and 
simple. And I believe, and it seems to me that human ex- 
perience shows this point so far, — what may happen in the 
future I do not know, — that the interests of society are best 
subserved by the individual ownership and the individual 
use of property. At any rate there have as yet been no 
social experiments in the world that are encouraging enough 
to make any wise man care to venture the prospects of the 
world in that direction. 



150 Life 

Then let us look at it another way. Suppose I wish to 
go to Chicago. What is my interest in the matter ? It is 
to be taken up here in Boston and set down in Chicago 
speedily, safely, economically. That is all the interest I 
have in the matter. Now, if I attain that end, what differ- 
ence does it make to me personally whether the ownership 
of the road is vested in the government at Washington or in 
the hands of one man or of forty men ? I wish to go 
speedily, safely, and economically to Chicago ; and I wish 
the management of the road to be such that I can attain 
that end. And I believe, as I study the experience of the 
world up to the present time, that it is in favor of the suppo- 
sition that we shall attain these ends best by means of pri- 
vate ownership and private competition. 

Consider another matter which helps a good deal, it seems 
to me, in a just estimate of the problems involved. I said 
that wealth is not a personal, private matter, and that it 
cannot be. No man who is rich can help serving the com- 
munity, even if he tries. He may waste a good deal of 
money. He may build himself more expensive houses, keep 
a more expensive establishment, than he needs. He may 
waste in selfish ways a large amount of money ; but the 
amount, after all, is comparatively small. We speak of it 
sometimes as an enormous waste. Take, simply as an illus- 
tration, a man like Mr. Vanderbilt. I do not know the 
amount of his wealth ; but let us suppose it is two hundred 
millions of dollars. He cannot possibly eat a very large 
amount of that, nor wear it, nor put it into a house. 
What he can use in these personal ways is comparatively 
a small fraction of the two hundred millions. Now, what 
must he do with the rest ? He must serve you and me with 
it, in spite of himself. Even if he withdrew the whole two 
hundred millions from public service, if he had it melted down 



Wealth and Poverty 151 

into bars of gold, and buried in his cellar, he could not dam- 
age the public much. The business of the United States 
would not stop if two hundred millions of dollars were with- 
drawn from circulation. He would hurt himself a thousand 
times more than he would hurt others ; for, if he should put 
all of his money into bars of gold and bury it, he would 
become a pauper, and, the moment he uses a fraction of it 
to buy something to eat or wear or a house to live in, he 
begins to serve the community by its use. He cannot avoid 
it. And then, as to the other larger part of the fortune 
which he cannot possibly use for his own personal aggran- 
dizement or pleasure, the only way he can get his percentage 
of profit is by putting it into public circulation, by using it 
for the public good. It is, then, as I said, a matter of expe- 
diency whether a man shall be permitted to hold and use 
according to his own judgment the wealth that has come into 
his possession or whether he shall surrender it to the public 
to use at its discretion. I believe the total experience of 
the world is in favor of private ownership and private com- 
petition. 

Let us turn now to the matter of poverty. I only wish to 
touch on a few principles underlying the matter. 

What does poverty mean ? The only poverty that is an 
injury to a man is that which makes him incapable of growth, 
which takes away from the means of growth, which hinders 
his becoming what he is capable of being. A man who has 
enough to live on with comfort, who has attained what Mr. 
Emerson means when he speaks of " plain living and high 
thinking," is not a man to be pitied, even though he attain 
this at the cost of effort. As I told you last Sunday, the 
man who is released from the necessity of effort, unless 
there is a spring in him which leads him to put forth this 
effort voluntarily, has by that very fact been injured, and is 



152 Life 

in danger of being degraded. For only by effort comes 
growth. The one evil of poverty, then, is this, — that it 
puts it beyond the reach of a person to be able to attain 
the possibilities of unfolding and growth which are in his 
nature. 

Now, what are the causes of poverty ? I shall speak of 
two or three necessary causes and of one or two that are not 
necessary. 

The first cause of poverty is the niggardliness of the earth. 
The earth is not very bountiful. We are compelled to work 
all the time, and to use all the resources at our disposal to 
produce as much wealth as to-day exists. 

The next cause of poverty that I will speak of is a social 
one, — the unwise meddling and interference of law-makers. 
I believe that any amount of poverty is produced by this. I 
think we have altogether too much legislation on social and 
economical matters. People who know very little about it 
attempt to doctor the patient, and leave him worse off than 
he was before. More individual initiative, greater effort to 
find out how people can do things best, and less legislative 
meddling are things greatly to be desired. 

Then there are two necessary causes which can only excite 
pity and sympathy. There are thousands of people who, 
from one cause or another, are incapable. This does not 
mean that a man shall be idiotic or insane. There are 
different grades of incapacity. There are noble men and 
noble women who simply as a matter of inheritance are 
incapable of combating with the world. Take two men and 
drop them suddenly in California, in the streets of San 
Francisco ; and inside of six months one will have a flour- 
ishing business, and the other will have accomplished noth- 
ing at all, the circumstances being the same. For one 
reason or another, one man does not seem to be able to 



Wealth and Poverty 153 

grasp and manage his conditions so as to get anything out 
of them. We pity a deformed man, a lame man, for the 
reason that he is not able to keep up. Let us extend our 
tender sympathy to those who are mentally crippled or lame. 
It is as inevitably a misfortune as the other, and is even a 
greater one. 

The next necessary cause is illness. Thousands of people 
are ill and cannot take care of themselves, and must of 
necessity be helped, or they suffer and starve. 

Beyond these causes there are several that are not neces- 
sary, such as vice, idleness, unthrift, the attempt of men to 
live by their wits, not trying to create wealth, but merely to 
get by indirection a fraction of that which some one else has 
created. These causes all lead down to poverty inevitably. 

But it is not of poverty as a comfortable condition of strug- 
gle — the mere opposite of wealth — that I wish to speak. 
It is not that which calls for pity : it is rather that which we 
mean when we use the word " pauperism." I believe that it 
is possible for society as it goes on and gets wiser to elimi- 
nate pauperism from the world. If the community is to sup- 
port the incompetent and the sick, — those who for one rea- 
son or another are incapable of taking care of themselves, — 
then it undoubtedly has the right to see to it that its re- 
sources shall not be lessened by the unthrift, the theft, the 
dishonesty, of those who could support themselves if they 
would. I believe that society has a right — and it ought to 
exercise it — to take tender, loving care of those who cannot 
take care of themselves, whatever be the" cost, and then to 
compel those who are well and strong and capable to do one 
of two things,- 1 — earn their own living or starve. These men 
have no right to prey on the community, to lessen the 
amount of the world's wealth, that is needed for some higher 
purpose than merely to support drones. 



154 Life 

There are some of the problems of poverty that are so 
complicated as to be immensely difficult. Take as a hint, of 
what I think comes home with special emphasis to those of 
us who are actively engaged in this work, the case of the 
man who is a drunkard, bound by law, and perhaps — and 
the wonder of it, too — by love, to a woman noble, faithful, 
true, — cases which we are facing perpetually, where, to help 
the woman and family, starving, cold, in trouble of every 
kind, you must also feed the drunken appetite, the most 
utterly worthless man. These are the problems that make 
the question of poverty a difficult one to deal with practi- 
cally. I believe that there ought to be quick and sharp work 
made of those men who are chronic and habitual drunkards. 
I believe the State should take them, as it would criminals or 
any others who habitually prey on the community, and put 
them where they would be obliged to earn at least the satis- 
faction of their common animal needs. 

Now, at the close, one word as to the great question, What 
shall the rich man do with his money ? I refer now not to the 
matter of supporting himself, not to his house, his carriage, 
his clothing, the works of art, of literature and music, with 
which he chooses to fill his home. But what shall he do 
with the great surplus that he does not really need ? I 
would have no laws touching this matter. We know that 
they have a legal right to do with it as they please. 

Let me make a suggestion. I would have a man perfectly 
free to leave his property to wife and daughters, — yes, and 
to sons, so far as they can be assisted to get on their feet ; 
though I believe, and I know, whatever you think of your 
own children, that you will agree with me in regard to other 
homes and children, that nine times out of ten the sons are 
injured more than they are helped by having too much 
money left to *hem. They are rare boys, indeed, who are so 



Wealth and Poverty 155 

high keyed with honor and the impulse to serve their kind 
that they do not let down a little when too much money is 
put into their hands. Thousands of fathers have injured 
those they loved by leaving too much property to them. 

Recur for a moment to the fundamental principle that I 
dealt with at some length awhile ago. I said that the 
owner of this wealth is not you alone. It is you and man. 
Now, where comes in man's share, humanity's share ? You 
could never have accumulated this wealth but for the assist- 
ance of humanity. I would have no laws on the subject; 
but I would educate the thought and the conscience of the 
world up to a grand use of these accumulated thousands. 
Mr. Andrew Carnegie, in a remarkable article in the North 
America?! Review not a great while ago, declared that he 
thinks the time will come when it will be considered a dis- 
grace for a man to die very rich, a disgrace for him simply 
to leave his thousands or his millions to his own family and 
friends. He recognizes, on the theory that I have just elab- 
orated, that no man has been able to accumulate, and there- 
fore no man owns, this alone ; and he advises — and he is 
taking his own advice — the use of this great surplus wealth 
while the man is living, so that he can see after its judicious 
and wise expenditure, so that he can rejoice in the good that 
he has accomplished by it. 

I never expect to have an opportunity of trying this experi- 
ment. I do not know how I should do if I had it ; but it 
seems to me that, if I were worth hundreds of thousands or 
millions, there would be no higher joy than for me to try to 
help the world with it while I was here, while I could see 
what was being done with it, and not leave it to be fought 
over in the courts, diverted from purposes I had in mind. 
It seems to me that I should take perfect delight in helping 
the public. There are a hundred ways : public parks, public 



156 Life 

libraries, public schools, higher institutions of learning, and 
many others suggest themselves. 

Then there is one other that I will take the opportunity 
to refer to just now, because I have found many instances 
of it. Men who are capable of doing the highest and best 
work should be set free from the necessity of earning bread 
and butter, and thus have an opportunity to do the higher 
work. The average community is never anxious to have 
that which is very much above it, because it does not under- 
stand or appreciate it ; but you and I and a few here and 
there, who can foresee which way the world is moving, can 
appreciate these things. I can see a man here and a woman 
there capable of doing work that is of public importance, 
and yet hampered, hindered, tied down to the necessity 
of simply keeping their stomachs from complaining, kept 
from this work which would be of universal worth, because 
not free. It seems to me I should love, — I have now 
in mind two or three such cases, — I should love to say 
to these men : I know what your ideals are, what you are 
reaching out after, what you are capable of doing : go and 
do it, — not because I give you the liberty, the opportunity 
personally, I act simply as the agent of the community. 
Do the higher, nobler work of which you are capable, not 
for me, but for humanity. I know men who would do 
grander work than they are doing if they were not harassed, 
were not troubled, by what would come to them if they were 
suddenly taken ill, of what would come to their families and 
those dependent on them, who would do higher work if they 
were set free. It seems to me that, if I were rich, I should 
love to pick out this man and that one, and thus set them 
to their best work. 

These only as hints of what men of wealth might do. It 
seems to me so much more noble, so much grander, than 



Wealth and Poverty 157 

merely holding wealth tight until the white fingers of death 
tear open the grasp and take it away. What comfort in 
that? What comfort in leaving it for the possible injury, 
the possible ruin of those we love, leaving it to be fought 
over in the courts, leaving it to be diverted from the pur- 
poses you had most deeply at heart? Why not take the 
joy of doing it while you can see it done and know the 
results ? 

And at the last, if the poor, the discontented, the laboring 
men of the world, could only see the rich recognizing these 
opportunities and animated by these motives, all enmity 
would disappear, the world would flow together in love, and 
the kingdom of God would be very nigh. 



MR. BELLAMY'S NATIONALISM. 



I had intended, and so announced on the printed slips 
that set forth the series of sermons in which I am now en- 
gaged, to have covered the whole question of social agita- 
tion under the one heading " Social Dreams," making Na- 
tionalism only a part, giving it a place along with others. 
But the importance of the subject at the present time, as 
estimated by the popular interest in it, is such as to make it 
seem best to devote one entire discourse to that topic. I 
shall therefore, under some such title as Social Dreams, as 
I have been requested, consider other phases of the present 
social agitation, and perhaps announce more clearly my own 
personal views next Sunday morning. 

This morning, then, as I have said, my subject is " Mr. 
Bellamy's Nationalism." 

It is a very hopeful sign that the people are so widely and 
so intensely interested in questions of social reform. It is 
well that they are not contented, that, whatever progress 
may have been made in the past, whatever progress we may 
be making to-day, it does not satisfy us. It is well that peo- 
ple are haunted by dreams, and that in all directions they 
desire something better than has yet been attained. When 
you find the ground restless in the gardens and fields in the 
spring, you know it means that there is life there. And in a 
field where there is life you expect to see not only flowers 



Mr. Bellamy's Nationalism 159 

and grain, but also weeds ; and you are not willing to give up 
the flowers and grain for the sake of getting rid of the weeds. 
You are willing that they should grow together for the sake 
of attaining the finest results. This wide-spread interest, 
this general agitation, is a most hopeful condition of things ; 
and though for the time being people are astray, though they 
are chasing some will-of-the-wisp, thinking it a star, though 
they are on a road that can lead to no practical result, still, 
in spite of these things, it is well ; for there is always hope 
where there is life, where there is movement, where there is 
earnest search for the attainment of some ideal end. The 
only discouraging condition of things is utter quiescence, 
stagnation ; for the force that leads people wrong will lead 
them right, when they find the way. 

But there is an offset to this. So long as people are on a 
false track, so long as they are seeking impractically, just so 
long, of course, they are wasting time, wasting power, wast- 
ing enthusiasm, that might be expended in bringing about 
practicable results. So, then, it seems to me very important 
for us earnestly, carefully, patiently, to look into these pro- 
posed theories of social reform, and to find out what they 
promise to the world ; to see, if we can, whether these prom- 
ises are capable of realization, and whether, indeed, we wish 
them realized. 

Now, I have two or three counts in the indictment which 
I wish to bring against Mr. Bellamy's Nationalism, on this 
ground : that it seems to me it is based on a misconception 
as to actual facts and conditions, and that it promises things 
that, if we could realize, we should hesitate about, but that 
seem to me are in their nature not capable of realization. 

At the outset, I wish to note two or three underlying 
assumptions. It is one of the common devices of the re- 
former to try to persuade people that things are in a very 



160 Life 

bad way, so bad that there is need of desperate remedies, 
that something immediate must be done. If he can persuade 
people of this, then he naturally gets them to turn with a 
great deal of interest and enthusiasm to his proposed pan- 
acea. 

There are three underlying assumptions of Nationalism 
that seem to me not only false, but mischievous. They are 
not exclusively confined to this system. They are assumed 
by Mr. Henry George and by a good many other social agi- 
tators as well ; but this morning I am speaking of National- 
ism, and so shall refer to them only as connected with that. 

In the first place, Mr. Bellamy assumes that the present 
condition of the industrial world is about as bad as it can be, 
and that it is getting worse all the time. This is the funda- 
mental idea back of it all. In his very last manifesto, in an 
address in Tremont Temple only a little while ago,* on the 
occasion of the first anniversary of the formation of the 
Nationalist Club, he sets forth what he claims to be his con- 
viction in regard to the matter as strongly as language is 
capable of doing it. He tells us that the tendency is to con- 
centrate all the wealth of the country in a very few hands, 
and that this tendency is going on with a sort of geometric 
ratio. He says that within one hundred years " one three- 
hundredth of the people have succeeded in freezing out their 
65,000,000 partners as to more than half the assets of the 
concern, and within thirty years they will have secured the 
remainder." He says that the method by which riches are 
being acquired at the present time has eaten out the founda- 
tions of the country's honesty. He says that this "new 
order of nobility" — meaning the rich — "is laying its foun- 
dations deep by obtaining absolute mastery of the means of 
support of the people." He says that the time is coming 
very rapidly when there " will be no class between the very 

*Dec. 20, i88q. 



Mr. Bellamy's Nationalism 161 

rich, living on their capital, and the mass of wage-workers 
and salaried men absolutely dependent on the former." * 

This is his description of the social and industrial condi- 
tion, contained in these hints as to what actually exists now 
and what is rapidly coming to pass. 

Now, as a matter of fact, nothing could be very much 
more nearly false than these statements. It is not true that 
the rich are rapidly growing richer, and the poor rapidly 
growing poorer, and that the poor are becoming more and 
more dependent on the rich. What are the plain, hard, cold 
facts ? 

During the period covered by the years between 1850 and 
1880, the average income of the wage-worker in England 
almost doubled. The same was substantially true for the 
same period in this country. What is true in regard to the 
increase of wealth ? It is true that a very large number of 
people are rich to-day who were not rich fifty years ago, — 
that is, the number of comparatively rich people is rapidly 
increasing ; but it is also true that the percentage of profit 
that accrues to capital is growing less and less every year, 
and the percentage of profit that is turned over to labor is 
growing more and more every year. This is the result of 
careful statistical inquiry, both in England and in this coun- 
try ; and it is simply an unspeakable absurdity for a man to 
talk about the condition of the average man or woman as 
getting worse, in the light of the facts as to their comparative 
conditions now and two or three hundred years ago. The 
average day laborer in America in this year of our Lord 1890 
has more of all the ordinary every-day comforts of life, he 
has more food for the brain, more food for heart-culture, more 
to lift up and stimulate him to spiritual aspiration, more of 
all those things that contribute to the ordinary well-being 
and the comfort of a man, than could possibly have been 

* See Our Day for January, 1890. 



162 Life 

possessed by Queen Elizabeth or any of her court. There 
is no comparison between the conditions of the two. The 
common laborer to-day is better off than even the nobility 
were five hundred years ago in England. There is hardly 
a tramp between the Atlantic and the Pacific that to-day is 
not better off than was the average day laborer of England 
at that time. What is true of the mass of our farmers 
throughout this country, the mass of our mechanics, the 
mass of our day laborers ? Nearly all of them have a com- 
fortable house, most of them have a carpet on at least one 
room. Thousands of them have a piano. They have music, 
they have books. If they have not good schools for their 
children where they are, you will find that in many cases 
they are able to send the son or the daughter to some good 
school at a distance. You will find this to be the general 
condition of the working people through the country ; and 
I dare to say that there is not a man in America of ordinary 
ability, of good health and good habits, who cannot easily 
earn his support, and a little something besides. I do not 
say, by any means, that we are in an ideal condition. I 
only say that the fundamental assumption of many of these 
social reformers is false from beginning to end. 

There is another false assumption ; and that is that the day 
laborer, the poor people, as the word goes, are the ones that 
create all the wealth, and that rich people, by some under- 
hand, indirect way, take it away from them. One of the 
most famous things in Mr. Bellamy's book is that picture 
with which you are all familiar, in which he compares society 
to a stage-coach. I do not believe it is possible for human 
ingenuity to put more falsehood into a comparison than is 
contained in that. What is the representation ? It is that 
the poor people, the drudges, the day laborers, are the ones 
who are pulling the coach along. They are tired, they are 



Mr. Bellamy's Nationalism 163 

in the mud, they are disheartened. But they are pulling the 
coach, which is society, along. And the rich, the cultured, 
the favorites of fortune, are inside, or sitting on the top, en- 
joying the scenery and having a pleasant time. This is the 
way he pictures the world as going on. Now and then a 
man falls off from the top, and has at once to pull on the 
ropes, or one who is pulling may drop the ropes and climb 
to the top ; but the point is that the drudges, the workers, 
are pulling the world along, and all the brain, the culture, 
the wealth, are riding and having a good time. Nothing 
could be falser than the whole idea. 

Who is it that gets the world on ? It is almost never the 
drudges, the mere hand-workers who get the world forward. 
It is the brain and culture of the world that have been the 
cause of every step of advance, up and on, since the world 
began; and it is this same brain and culture of the world 
that have created ninety-nine one-hundredths of all the 
wealth of the world as well. Did Mr. McCormick do noth- 
ing towards the advancement of the world ? Did the in- 
ventor of the cotton-gin do nothing? Did the inventor of 
the steam-engine do nothing ? 

How is it about those who have thought out the ways by 
which the world has gone forward ? Who was it that freed 
four million slaves, and created the beginning, at least, of 
a new civilization in this country ? Was it the slaves ? Did 
they pull American society up and out of the old condition ? 
No : it was the educated and tender-hearted Garrison, the 
aristocratic Phillips ; it was the men of thought and culture 
and heart and brain power who thought out the way and did 
it for them. So far as we can see, the slaves would have 
been in a condition^ of slavery now if the initiative had 
waited to be taken by them. I use this only as an illustra- 
tion. Turn it whichever way you will, substantially the same 



1 64 Life 

thing is true. It is not the hand-workers that create the 
world's wealth, that the rich and the favored take away from 
them. 

Then it is utterly false to speak of the hand- workers as 
being the only laborers, as doing the whole of the work. 
The brain is physical as much as the muscles ; and, when a 
man thinks hard, he wears his brain out as much as a day 
laborer wears his hand out. Take one more illustration : 
I must refer to these only in a fragmentary way. A few 
years ago, Pasteur was studying quietly in Paris, engaged in 
what must have seemed to the ordinary workman a sort of 
pretentious idleness. He was studying the diseases of in- 
sects, about as unpractical a business, you would suppose, 
as any man could be engaged in. But it happened that the 
silk industry of some of the provinces of France was com- 
pletely prostrated, and thousands of people thrown out of 
employment and whole regions prostrated by want. To 
whom did they look for relief ? To the hand laborer ? No : 
they sent to Pasteur, who went down and studied the prob- 
lem ; and in a little while, by the toil of brain and thought, 
and as the result of what they must have called doing noth- 
ing for several years, he saved more wealth and did more for 
the industries of France than all the laborers could have 
done in a hundred years. So much, then, for this second 
fallacy. 

Another fallacy seems to me even more mischievous. Mr. 
Bellamy is doing what he can to create a separation of class 
sympathy that shall make it very difficult for the rich and 
the poor, the thinkers and the hand-workers, to co-operate 
in bringing about a better condition of things. For what 
does he do ? He pictures in glowing words an ideal condi- 
tion of things, a millennium ; and he teaches the laborer, and 
all those who follow him and accept his doctrine, that there 



Mr. Bellamy's Nationalism 165 

is no reason in the world why this perfect condition of things 
should not be realized in a very few years, except for the 
soullessness of corporations and the sordid greed of the 
rich. Here, then, is a heaven waiting ready for everybody j 
but a few rich people and a few corporations are standing 
at the gate and keeping the rest of the world out. That is 
the picture ; and, again, from beginning to end it is utterly 
false. 

There is no crasser ignorance, no cruder analysis, dis- 
played by anybody on earth than by the man who assumes 
that all institutions, all social conditions, are created and 
kept up by a certain few people for their own advantage. 
There are crass and ignorant religious critics who are all 
the time talking as though religions had been invented by 
a few priests for the sake of getting power to rob the people. 
Stupidly foolish and ignorant the whole idea, as though any 
few people ever had power over a nation to create its insti- 
tutions for them ! Institutions are always growths, and 
always the incarnation of popular thought, popular feeling, 
and popular will. There is not a national institution on the 
face of the earth to-day that could last a week if the people 
did not want it. Talk about the Catholic Church domi- 
nating, shaping, ruling Europe ! It is because the people 
of Europe want the Catholic Church that it exists. Now 
and then, of course, when an institution gets too old, when 
people have learned that the fundamental ideas out of 
which it sprang were false, there may be here and there a 
man who will try to keep up the delusion for the sake of 
holding the advantageous position that he has ; but no in- 
stitution ever came into existence in any such fashion. And 
so our social and industrial institutions were not created by 
individuals for their own advantage ; and they cannot be 
preserved by individuals for their own advantage. They are 



1 66 Life 

the natural growth of all the past nistory of humanity, the 
next step upward and onward ; and no person, no class, is 
responsible for them. 

These three fundamental assumptions, then, on which 
Nationalism rests, which are supposed to be the reason 
for the urgent necessity of adopting it, are false from be- 
ginning to end. Of course, I do not mean that Mr. Bellamy 
would consciously misrepresent : I only say that he is griev- 
ously mistaken as to his facts. 

This leads me now, very naturally, to consider the fitness 
of Mr. Bellamy for the great work of the social reorganiza- 
tion of the modern world. We are not left here to guess- 
work. He tells us himself how it happened that he has 
become the most conspicuous representative of social reform 
in this country ; and he says that it was purely by accident. 
It is noteworthy that he has never studied the social condi- 
tions of the world in the past. Social reform is not a 
specialty of his; he does not claim to be learned on the 
subject. He has not traced the origins and the method of 
growth of modern society, so as to see in the light of them 
what the next step ought to be. How did he happen to 
become a social reformer, then ? He tells us in an article 
written for the Nationalist since the publication of his book.* 
He says : " I had, at the outset, no idea of attempting a 
serious contribution to the movement of social reform. The 
idea was of a mere literary fantasy, a fairy tale of social 
felicity. There was no thought of contriving a house which 
practical men might live in, but merely of hanging in mid- 
air, far out of reach of the sordid and material world of the 
present, a cloud-palace for an ideal humanity." 

And then, in another part of the same article, he says, 
" Something in this way it was that, no thanks to myself, I 
stumbled over the destined corner-stone of the new social 
order." 

* The Nationalist for May, 1889. 



Mr. Bellamy's Nationalism \6y 

This is the way "Looking Backward" came to be written. 
When I heard Mr. Bellamy give the first address that he ever 
made in public, last May, in Tremont Temple, at the anniver- 
sary of the Free Religious Association, I was ready to believe 
what he says of himself; for in that he showed ignorance 
worthy of a school-boy concerning the very fundamental prin- 
ciples of the science and philosophy of the modern world. 
I smiled some years ago, when looking over a lecture of Mr. 
Talmage on Evolution, to find that the great Brooklyn 
preacher did not know what he was talking about. He went 
on to speak of some of the principal phrases, catchwords, 
of Darwinism and evolution in a way quite worthy of a 
school-boy, and a small one at that. He simply did not 
know what these phrases meant; and I said at once, and 
naturally, I have no use for Mr. Talmage as a social or 
scientific leader. And so, when I heard Mr. Bellamy make 
precisely the same blunder,* when I heard him speak of the 
law of "the survival of the fittest," and knew by the way 
in which he spoke that he had not the slightest idea what 
it meant, I said, Here, at any rate, is not a hopeful man for 
the discussion of these great themes. A man who under- 
takes to discuss the movement of the modern world on prin- 
ciples of scientific development ought at least to know what 
the phrase " the survival of the fittest " means. 

This, then, being the way, and this being a hint as to the 
equipment with which he started out, let us now glance at 
the essence, the fundamental idea, of the new reform. 

How does Mr. Bellamy propose to bring in the new and 
perfect social order? A writer in the Transcript of last 
night t says that the Socialists do not propose to go the 
whole length of " Looking Backward " now ; that they were 
only going to try in this direction and that, and see how 
things work. And I heard some one say, who is giving a 

* See The New Ideal, July, 1889, p. 112. t Feb. 15, 1890. 



1 68 Life 

great deal of thought to this subject, that we are in danger 
of misrepresenting Socialists, if we take " Looking Back- 
ward " to be anything more than a dream, a fairy tale. 
But yet Mr. Bellamy himself declares, in the words that I 
have read, that this is to be the foundation-stone of the 
coming order of things ; and in his very last manifesto, 
given in Tremont Temple, he says, "Our plan of recon- 
struction is the simple and obvious one of placing the in- 
dustrial duty of citizens on the ground on which their mili- 
tary duty already rests." The last word that he has spoken 
on the subject is the reannouncement of the essential prin- 
ciple of his book " Looking Backward." We have a right, 
then, in dealing with his type of Nationalism, to take that 
as the freshest and clearest view on the subject. 

What, then, does Mr. Bellamy propose to do ? I cannot 
go into details. I give you only the central thought. He 
proposes to organize all society — that is, all men and 
women between the ages of twenty-one and forty -five — into a 
great army, precisely after the plan of the great standing 
armies of the nations of the world to-day. He proposes to 
organize all workers into one vast military order. Each man 
is to have his place assigned to him, and is to do the work 
that is given him to do. He is to have his individual liberty 
of initiative, of choice, practically taken away from him be- 
tween the ages of twenty-one and forty-five. He believes 
that in this way there can be produced enough wealth to 
supply the wants of everybody and make everybody comfort- 
able and happy. This is his central idea. 

I wish now to examine this idea, and see what its practical 
outcome would be likely to be. 

To begin with, I wish to note what people very easily 
overlook, that he proposes to establish here in America a 
hard, fixed, fast, universal, absolute despotism. There is no 






Mr. Bellamy's Nationalism 169 

despotism that is quite equal to the despotism of a great 
standing army, like that of Germany, for example. This is 
an illustration of what he proposes to do with modern so- 
ciety. 

Note that this is just where the world began. Go back 
five, ten, fifteen, twenty, forty thousand years, and you find 
the tribes and nations of that time with no individual initia- 
tive, with no individual ownership, under absolute despot- 
ism, the individual counting for nothing, society counting for 
everything. Instead, then, of this being a new discovery of 
the modern world, having in it the promise and potency of a 
higher type of civilization, it is only a case of the most re- 
markable atavism with which I am familiar. It is only the 
rediscovery of the despotic barbarism in which the world 
began. Not one single step has the world taken from those 
old days to this except along the lines of and towards the 
development of individual liberty, individual initiative. And 
this country — and this is the one thing we are proudest of 
— is distinguished by being the country where the individual 
is most free ; and Mr. Bellamy asks us to surrender all this, 
to give up our personal liberty, and submit to the worst type 
of despotism of which it is possible for anybody to conceive. 

How does Mr. Bellamy propose to make people work 
under this despotism ? What is he going to do with people 
who do not choose to work ? It is very significant to note 
with what ease he slips over the hard places. He says : 
" As for actual neglect of work, positively bad work, or other 
overt remissness on the part of men incapable of generous 
motives, the discipline of the industrial arm is far too strict 
to allow much of that. A man able to do his duty, and 
persistently refusing, is cut off from all human society." 

Again he says.: "Our entire social order is so wholly 
based upon and deduced from it that, if it were conceivable 



170 Life 

that a man should escape it, he would be left with no pos- 
sible way to provide for his existence. He would have ex- 
cluded himself from the world, cut himself off from his 
kind." 

And again he says that under Nationalism every man will 
be entirely free to act according to his natural aptitude, 
"subject only to necessary regulation." Necessary regula- 
tion ! Necessary regulation is all that the Czar of Russia 
asks for. Necessary regulation is all that the King of 
Dahomey wants. The Catholic Church, in the days of the 
Inquisition, the stake, the boot, the thumb-screw, was only 
exercising the " necessary regulation " ; and when a man 
became too great a heretic, and he was to be cut off from 
human society, the ecclesiastical court recommended him to 
God's mercy and the secular arm, asking that he be quietly 
put out of the way without the shedding of blood, — which 
meant that he should be burned. 

Cover it with any soft disguise which you please, a system 
under which every man is to be put to a task and compelled 
to carry it out by a power that is over him spying him, watch- 
ing him at every turn, is simply the grossest and meanest 
form of despotism of which you can conceive. 

One other point. Mr. Bellamy quietly assumes, what is 
as false as it can be, that somehow or other there is plenty of 
wealth lying round for everybody ; that all that is necessary 
is some new method of distributing it. He needs to prove, 
if he asks us to give up our individual liberty and submit to 
a despotism like this, that there is going to be good enough 
in the way of result to make that pay. He does not prove 
that the world will be any richer under this method. Under 
this compulsory system is any more wealth to be produced ? 
We know by facts and figures that there is not wealth 
enough in existence now to make everybody well off, if it were 



Mr. Bellamys Nationalism 171 

ever so evenly divided. He must prove that such a system 
would be sure to create more wealth. Would a system in 
which no one is going to work except those from twenty-one 
to forty-five, and those under compulsion, produce a great 
deal more wealth than people produce to-day? To-day a 
man away out West on a little farm, all alone, out of sight 
of everybody, will work hard. Why ? Because he owns his 
little farm, which he has taken up, or he is trying to pay for 
it. He expects to build a house, and hopes a railroad will 
come along and increase the value of the land. He is work- 
ing under the only impulse and motive under which any 
man yet ever voluntarily did work since the world began; 
and you may trust him to do it, because that motive holds 
good. Mr. Bellamy proposes to take away that motive. 
How is he going to keep that lonely man away on that farm 
at work ? He would need a policeman to watch him all the 
time. 

Under this pro'posed system, every man becomes an em- 
ployee of the State, and the only motive for him to work is 
the fact that somebody is to compel him to work. It seems 
to me that we should need about half the people turned into 
officials or police to watch and superintend the other half. 
At any rate, there is not one single illustration brought for- 
ward as yet, to my knowledge, that even suggests the hope 
that more product would result from this new system than 
from the one under which we are living to-day; and any 
system is vitally defective that does not promise to give 
us more wealth ; for, as I have said, we have not enough 
to go round now, and make everybody well off. 

Then there is another aspect of it which seems to me at 
times ridiculous, as I contemplate it. Instead of this being 
a brand-new theory to apply to our new country and our 
modern civilization, Nationalism is nothing but the last 



172 Life 

frayed out, ragged remnant of the old paternal theory of 
European governments. If you want to picture the whole 
theory, ask the question as to who is this government which 
is going to do everything ? Where is it ? What is it ? This 
theory assumes some power not the people that are at work, 
some power that is all-wise and able to superintend a scheme 
like this, some power that is almighty and able to keep every- 
body at work, with a vast storehouse of wealth that it is 
ready to dispense to everybody. 

On this theory, as soon as the new system is started, there 
are to be shorter hours and higher pay ; but we are not told 
where the money is to come from to pay the workers. It 
assumes the existence of this thing called a government that 
is going to do everything. Where is it ? Who is it ? In 
this country, who is the government ? Why, it is made up of 
you and me. That is all the government there is ; and, if you 
and I are not already wise enough to do everything, and 
good enough to do everything, and rich enough to do every- 
thing, and strong enough to do everything, how do we sud- 
denly become rich and wise and good and strong by saying 
the word " government " over instead of " you and me " ? 
It seems to me, if we analyze the thing to its lowest terms, 
that the reason, or the unreason, lies just here. Suppose I 
say, I am not able to support myself quite as well as I 
should like to be supported. I cannot do it alone. You 
are not able to support yourself quite as well as you would 
like to be supported. Now let us do this : you agree to sup- 
port me, and I will agree to support you, and we will both 
be rich. I think that is not a misrepresentation. It seems 
to me a perfectly fair analysis. It bears a striking resem- 
blance to an amusing story I have heard of a man who 
thought he should get married. He said, " I can about 
half support myself; and I think it will be a pity if my wife 



Mr. Bellamy's Nationalism 173 

cannot do the other half." As to who was going to support 
his wife meantime he did not give a hint. While I am sup- 
porting you, and you are supporting me, while everybody 
is engaged in supporting somebody else, how is it to come 
to pass that you or I, or the third or fourth person, is going 
to produce one single cent's worth more of property than we 
produce now ? I do not see how it is going to add to the 
social income. 

Then there is another thing. If Mr. Bellamy could carry 
out the scheme, and the casting of the final vote should be 
left with me, I would vote against it heart and brain and 
soul; for the scheme is low in its ideals and aims. It opens 
an unlimited field for political corruption. It is practically 
in its outcome even immoral, when you carefully analyze it. 
What is his kingdom of heaven ? He does not even hint 
that it is going to make any man or woman wiser or better 
than now. He says there is no need of change in human 
nature to bring about his kingdom of heaven. He will leave 
people as they are. The system which he proposes is not to 
make the world nobler or better, but only to redistribute the 
world's wealth, so that everybody will have enough to eat 
and drink and wear. That is the height of the ambition of 
Nationalism as set forth in Mr. Bellamy's book, — a universal 
pasture with grass enough in it for all. That is all there is 
to it. 

And then, as I said, it opens an unlimited field for political 
corruption; for all these people between twenty-one and 
forty-five are to be ruled by the men over forty-five. The 
latter are to have the entire power over the former in their 
hands. And, when you consider that it takes the President of 
the United States and his cabinet and a large part of Con- 
gress — if the newspaper reports are correct — a great part of 
their time to apDoint the custom-house officials and the post- 



174 Life 

masters o^ the country under the present system, with no end 
of fighting and quarrelling as to who these appointees shall 
be, what will be the condition when all the men over forty- 
five have nothing to do but to attend to politics, and instead 
of thousands there are millions to be appointed to places ? 

Then this puts a premium on laziness and inefficiency and 
incapacity. It is a practical denial of the method by which 
God has governed and led the world from the beginning 
until now. Charity is fine, if it is voluntary ; but involuntary 
charity is injustice. 

One point more, and one which alone, were none of the 
others true, would to my mind be absolutely fatal to the 
whole scheme. Where, under Mr. Bellamy's scheme, is that 
growth to come in out of which the future higher and finer 
things are to be born ? The people, mind you, are to be all 
under orders ; they are to do the work they are set to do, 
and no other. They are to have a little choice under " nec- 
essary regulation," that is all. Now, mark you this. The 
world at any particular time, if it is governed as a democ- 
racy, is governed as is the government in which we rejoice, 
under the rule of the average, is it not ? not under the rule 
of the wisest, not under the rule of the best. And did you 
ever stop to think that the best things of the world in every 
direction are always ahead of the average, so far above the 
average that they are not even appreciated by it ? In art, 
the average taste accepts very poor work, little above the 
"chromo." In literature, what books does the average buy 
and read ? And so in every department of thought the aver- 
age is not the leader. It does not lead in religion nor in 
education. Yet the average is to have the power to govern 
absolutely in this new kingdom of men, — just the common- 
place common sense of the majority. Now, if we were 
going to have a despotism at all, I for one would very much 



Mr. Bellamy s Nationalism 175 

prefer the despotism of one man, for it might happen now 
and then that he would be great and wise and good ; but 
this despotism of what Matthew Arnold calls " Philistinism," 
the hard, fast prejudices and stupidity of the average of 
human beings, — this would be intolerable. 

Take Isaiah and Micah and Jesus and Paul and Savona- 
rola and Kuss and Luther and Servetus and John Wesley 
and Channing and Parker, men so far above and beyond 
their age that, instead of being praised and appreciated, they 
were tortured and persecuted for what they did for men, — 
how would they have done their work ? Under Nationalism, 
who would have taken Jesus of Nazareth from his work- 
bench and set him to preaching throughout Galilee and in 
Jerusalem ? They murdered him for doing it, as it was. 
Would they have appointed him to that task, and paid him 
for doing it ? He would have been kept at his carpenter's 
bench, or dressing vines on the hillsides, until he was forty- 
five at least. So you may take any of the founders, the great 
leaders of the world in any department, the men who have 
seen something away ahead and beyond the vision of the 
majority, the ones to whom the world owes every fresh new 
step of progress that it has made, — these men would have 
been ruthlessly repressed, cut off. They would have been 
treated as wise men were treated in Spain. Do you remem- 
ber the story of the king who visited another king and asked 
him how he could get rid of the troublesome thinkers, the 
disturbers of the popular peace in his empire, and how the 
other king took him out for a walk in his garden, and with 
his stick struck off the heads of the flowers and the grasses 
that were a little higher than the average, and said, That is 
the way I do it ? That is the way the world has been kept 
back, by repression of individual initiative. There would be 
no place in the new scheme for thinkers, for leaders. All 



176 Life 

the best in religion, the best in ethics, the best in art, the 
best in literature, the best in music, would be lost. Of 
course, no one would ever appoint a man to those tasks and 
pay him for them. Under the present system, the men who 
have these gifts must work and fight their way and starve, 
perhaps, until the victory comes, — the victory not for them- 
selves, but for the world. 

Whether there be any way, then, by which society can be 
lifted up and led forward more rapidly than it is moving 
to-day, most certainly this is not the way. The way, as I be- 
lieve, lies precisely in the opposite direction, — not in the 
repression of the individual, not in the government of the 
masses, but in the fuller, freer development and play of in- 
dividual taste, individual power, individual life. 



OTHER SOCIAL DREAMS. 



In the olden time, the messenger who brought what was 
regarded as bad news to the king was in danger of his life ; 
at any rate, he was pretty sure to lose the king's favor and 
to be precluded from any high position of service in the 
future. The bringing of what is looked upon as bad news 
is never a gracious task ; and, whether the ruling power be 
king or a social majority, the principle is unchanged. A 
man who dares to oppose any prevalent social craze must 
expect to pay the necessary penalty for his temerity. Al- 
ready I have been accused, on account of the last sermon in 
this course, of taking sides against the welfare of the people 
and of preaching to please my wealthy parishioners. I am 
glad there is even a little wealth in the congregation ; but, 
if I desired to go with the majority so far as that is con- 
cerned, I should take the other side. It teaches me how 
little, after all, we really know ourselves. I had supposed 
up to this hour that, if there was anything in the direction 
of public reputation which I had earned, it was that of say- 
ing what I frankly and simply believed, without any regard 
to my own parishioners or the parishioners of anybody else. 
I speak of this simply to bring out the point that the man 
who dares to oppose the popular sentiment of the hour is apt 
to be looked at as opposing the real welfare of men, al- 
though he may be ever so earnestly trying to help it on. 



178 Life 

During the Middle Ages, a great army of children started 
out on a crusade for the Holy Land. Ignorant, inexperi- 
enced, knowing little of the geography of Europe or Asia, 
and supposing that the holy city of their search was only 
a little way off, they started, with high heart and strong cour- 
age, only day by day to meet with bitter disappointment. 
And as they marched, whenever they saw the spires of a 
town rising above the distant horizon, they cried out, " Is this 
Jerusalem ? " And then, disappointed, they either fell in 
their tracks or started out on the long and weary march once 
more. 

Humanity is on the march toward the holy city of its 
vision ; and the one difficulty is that we lack patience, lack 
persistence of effort. We are anxious to believe that every 
town we see is the Jerusalem of our search ; and he who is 
obliged to bring the bad news that the end of the journey 
is not yet, though his purpose be to guide and stimulate 
towards what is the true end, is in danger of incurring dis- 
pleasure because of the disappointment that he brings. And 
yet, certainly, next to the service of telling people what road 
they ought to follow is the service that a man renders his 
fellows when he tells them the road they ought not to follow. 
At least so much is gained, — that useless effort may be pre- 
vented. 

I propose this morning, in the first place, to note briefly — 
it must be that for lack of time — some of the chief social 
dreams that men have cherished, then to show the radical 
defects in them, and then, at the last, to point out what seem 
to me a few practical steps forward that we are capable of 
taking. 

First, then, for some of these social dreams. I am well 
aware that there are very few outright communists in the 
world at the present time, and that many may think I am 



Other Social Dreams 179 

speaking of something which is not a practical thing when 
I discuss communism ; and yet I need to note it for a mo- 
ment, because all these other dreams, whatever form they 
may take, are communistic in principle, and so similar ob- 
jections lie against them that lie against outright commun- 
ism. 

The grave defect of communism at the outset is, what I 
have had occasion to tell you before in other connections, 
that there is not wealth enough in existence in all the world 
to make all the people well off, as we say, contented, — not 
even enough to satisfy all the world's legitimate aims and 
needs. So, if there were an equal division to-day, we should 
be little benefited, as I think. For, until some power shall 
make men and women over so that they shall be equal in 
capacity, in brain power, in heart power, in goodness, what 
is the use of an equal division of substance ? An artificially 
established equality like that would not continue a week. 
And, then, certain grave objections lie against it, even if 
there were wealth enough to make ail prosperous. What 
is it to take by force wealth from the man who has created 
it and give it to one who has not ? Ought we not to label 
it with that ugly word " theft " ? For that it is. But you 
not only injure the man who has created the wealth by tak- 
ing away that which is his, you injure equally, perhaps even 
more, the man whom you unwisely make your beneficiary. 
For giving to a man outright that which he has not earned 
in such a fashion as this is only to put a premium upon lazi- 
ness or upon incapacity. It is to take away the one ade- 
quate motive force for human effort. And when you remem- 
ber that the only stimulus under which men have ever grown, 
have ever developed themselves as yet, is this desire for 
things and the reaching out after them for their attainment, 
and that, if you could take away this motive force, you would 



180 Life 

condemn the world to perpetual ignorance, perpetual stupid- 
ity, perpetual incapacity, you will realize that you would 
stunt and stop the very life-progress of mankind. Enough 
for that. 

Turn, next, to what has been the outgrowth of the noblest 
love of man, what a great many people thoroughly believe in 
to-day, industrial co-operation : what can we say of that ? 
One of the most distinguished essayists of the world,* in a 
recent number of the Forum^ closed his article by announc- 
ing his belief that the hope of the world lies in this principle 
of co-operation, — and, in order to set forth its merits, it is 
spoken of in contrast with competition, which is denounced 
as selfish and as calling out all the evil passions of men, — 
as an illustration of mutual help, of social love, and desire 
for the welfare of all. The trouble with this theory, it seems 
to me, at least one of the troubles, lies here. Organize your 
industrial co-operative society, or as many of them as you 
please, but by that you do not and you cannot escape the 
universal principle of competition. Whether we like it or 
not, as I have told you before, competition is the method of 
the universe, and has been from the first ; and I do not be- 
lieve that men can escape it any more than they can escape 
the air they breathe. If you have two co-operative manu- 
facturing societies, they must of necessity compete with each 
other for the general market. The only way you could es- 
cape it would be by having not only a national co-operative 
society, but a cosmopolitan co-operative society. Until you 
reach that point, competition is not escaped. 

But there is a more serious defect than that even ; and that 
is that it requires at the present time a large amount of capi- 
tal to organize and carry on any business successfully ; and 
the wage-workers of the world, in general, do not possess a 
sufficient amount of capital. They must look to the capital- 

*W. S. Lilly. t February, 1890. 



Other Social Dreams 181 

ist for aid. And then, when they have asked the capitalist 
for aid, what follows ? The capitalist must take all the risk 
of failure ; for the others have nothing to lose. Is it not fair, 
if you ask a man to do that, that he should have a larger 
share of the product ? If six men engage in a co-operative 
society, and three of them agree to take all the risk provided 
they fail, would you not think it fair and just that they should 
have a little more than half the product if they succeed ? 

But the gravest defect of all lies right here. Any man 
looking over the world can see that the number of business 
geniuses is very small. I am told — I have never verified 
the figures, and do not know whether they are accurate or 
not — that ninety-five per cent, of the men who go into busi- 
ness fail first or last during their careers. The number of 
men, then, who are capable of organizing and carrying on 
successfully great industrial enterprises is about as few as 
are the great military geniuses of the world. And how are 
these men chosen ? Never by popular vote. They are de- 
veloped as the result of the keenest competition. They are 
one of the most signal illustrations of the survival of the fit- 
test in their line. Here and there is a man who is capable 
of managing these great concerns. What would be the 
chances of any ordinary co-operative society of workmen 
electing a man who is fit, who is competent, who has de- 
veloped power, and keeping him in his place? You must 
change human nature, you must get rid of little petty jeal- 
ousies, you must get more of patience and power of waiting, 
more of trust in each other, before you can make business 
succeed on this basis. At any rate, there have been no 
experiments as yet that have been successful enough to give 
the world much hope in this direction. I should be glad if 
society could take a step ahead by that means ; but I confess, 
when I look at human nature and at the principles involved 



1 82 Life 

and the results of experience so far, I have very little hope 
that that is the road along which society is to advance. 

Another of the famous dreamers of the modern world is 
Count Tolstoi, who claims that he is the principal interpreter 
of Christianity at present living. So many are the defini- 
tions of Christianity that I do not wonder a man hesitates 
when you ask him if he is a Christian ; and sometimes I do 
not wonder if he hesitates to say that he really desires to be 
one. What is Christianity? According to Tolstoi, the cen- 
tral principle of Christianity is non-resistance. And, in ac- 
cordance with this principle, he would abolish all force. That 
is, Tolstoi' is an anarchist, in the philosophical sense of that 
word. He would abolish all government, all legal enforce- 
ment of contracts of any kind, all distinctions of nationali- 
ties, so far as it is possible ; and he thinks that literature 
and art and science, all that we are accustomed to regard as 
the higher and finer developments of civilization, are vanity. 
His ideal seems to be that every one should engage in com- 
mon physical labor for the supply of his own common phys- 
ical wants, and so reduce the world to this kind of dead level 
of animal comfort. I should not be in favor of it, even were 
it possible. As I look over Count Tolstoi's ideal country, it 
seems to me at least singularly uninteresting. I should die 
of ennui, if of nothing else. This animal comfort would be 
poor pay in exchange for the abdication on the part of 
humanity of these higher things that the world has developed 
as the result of its age-long struggle. 

One more social dream I must touch on. The most inter- 
esting book on political economy which I ever read was 
undoubtedly Mr. Henry George's " Progress and Poverty." 
They say that political economy is a dismal science. I did 
not find his book dismal at all ; and, when I laid it down, 
I found myself for a little while wondering that the human 



Other Social Dreams 183 

race had plodded on in its trouble and sorrow so long, won- 
dering that it had not actually stumbled on to the millennium, 
it seemed so easy, so simple, so practical. What is the cen- 
tral idea of Mr. Henry George ? He starts with the asser- 
tion, which can perhaps be philosophically defended with 
a good deal of success, that the earth belongs to man, that 
all the natural resources belong to the race ; that is, that 
that which man did not create he cannot call his own in an 
individualistic sense. The land was here before any man 
appeared. So Mr. Henry George says that all the land be- 
longs not to the individual, but to the people. And in carry- 
ing out his theory, or such part of it as he proposes, — for he 
does not even attempt to urge the carrying out of it all, — in 
carrying out such part as he thinks necessary, he practically 
urges the abolition of private ownership of land and an ap- 
propriation by the government of all land rents. A man 
would be able to hold property and buy and sell as to-day, 
only what they really buy and sell would not be the land, but 
the right to use it ; and the rent which the man now pays to 
the owner of the corner lot or building would be put into the 
national treasury. The great trouble, or one of the great 
troubles, with this theory is that he either carries it too far 
or else does not carry it far enough. If all the things that 
were here before the race began its career upon earth be- 
longed to the race, then not only the land, but all the waters, 
rivers, springs, all the mines, whether of gold or lead or 
whatever they may be, all the coal, all the natural gas, — and 
I do not see why not all electricity and steam, — would be- 
long to the race. But I cannot go into this to any extent 
or show you this morning why it is so. But only a little dis- 
cussion is required to show that it is utterly impracticable to 
carry out a theory like this. If we mean that all the land 
belongs to the race, then the people that live within the 



1 84 Life 

limits of the United States have no exclusive right to their 
own territory. They would be obliged in equity to divide 
the income with all the race of mankind, for anything I can 
see. The Fijis, the inhabitants of the South Sea Islands, 
have as much right to it as has Mr. George or any other man 
in America. And, then, it is simply impossible to divide, to 
draw the line, between that which nature furnishes and that 
which man has furnished. The coat which I wear this morn- 
ing a year or two ago was perhaps under the surface of the 
earth, the most of it. It grew up first as grass, was eaten 
by the sheep, and the sheep transformed it into wool ; and 
then by a good many other processes it has come to be what 
it is this morning. How much of it was produced by nature, 
and how much of it was the result of the application of 
human effort? How much of it do I own? How much of 
it belongs to the rest of the world ? The moment you begin 
to carry out a theory like this, you are met with a thousand 
impracticalities and impossibilities. But the one thing that 
to my mind settles the question so that we need not seri- 
ously try to discuss it lies in its utter inadequacy. Mr. 
George teaches that in this way the whole country could be 
made well off. The societies organized to carry out his 
ideas have been called " Anti-poverty Societies " ; and the 
claim has been that, if people would only accede to this 
method, poverty might be abolished. But, evidently, Mr. 
George did not cipher out his problem very carefully. I am 
going to use the figures that have been furnished by a man 
who is well known as a political economist, and who has 
made a study of the matter. He tells me that, according to 
the census of 1880, if all the ground rent of America were 
divided up, it would amount to only two cents apiece per day 
all round. That is, my share for a year would be a little 
over seven dollars. I do not quite see how that is going to 



Other Social Dreams 185 

abolish my poverty. In other words, if you carried out Mr. 
George's theory, it would simply amount to about half the 
taxes that are now paid to the government. Mr. George 
assumed in his book that we might by adopting his theory 
abolish custom-houses and all methods of revenue for gov- 
ernment expenses, and have a large surplus for public 
libraries and public works of different kinds and to add to 
the general wealth. As a matter of fact, it would only pay 
one-half the taxes of the country, which is so slight a thing 
that, if there were no other objection to his theory, this 
would leave it where it is not worth while to waste one's 
breath over it. 

These are all the social theories that are prominent 
enough to demand mention this morning. 

What is the radical difficulty with all of them ? The diffi- 
culty, it seems to me, is that they are what I have called 
them, " dreams." They are in the air : they are out of all 
practical, vital relation with the forces under the impulse 
of which the world has come to its present stage. They are 
not theories deduced from the working principles of human 
experience. 

Now, the one way by which any light can be thrown on 
the future is as the result of a careful study of the past. If 
we can find out how the world has taken its steps of progress 
in the past, we shall have a little light at least, if not all we 
want, on the next step to be taken. 

These theories overlook another great fact. This uni- 
verse is not a dead one. It is not a stagnant one : it does 
not keep still. If you look back to the beginning, and then 
down the centuries until the present time, you can see that 
there has been a drift, a tendency, a flood, as mighty, as 
resistless as a river. The universe is moving, — moving in 
certain definite directions, and with tremendous force ; and 



1 86 Life 

it is simply childish for any man to imagine that he can 
change this great, mighty, onward sweep of things. It is 
absurd for any man to suppose that he can devise what 
he regards as a desirable condition of things, and get the 
universe outright and straightway to accept it. I can pict- 
ure a millennium that at the present time would seem satis- 
factory to me; but how am I going to overcome the tre- 
mendous drift of things ? How am I going to suddenly 
change human nature, human impulse, the force of tradition ? 
How am I going to make the universe over all at once into 
the shape of my dream ? The only wise, because the only 
practical, thing is for us to study the drift, or force, the move- 
ments of things, and find out which way they are going, 
and then co-operate with them. If I believed the universe 
was going all wrong, I should straightway give it up, try 
to be as comfortable as I might, and let it go. It is simply 
foolish for any one man to suppose that he can change the 
nature of the universe. That is the difficulty with most 
of these theories. They assume that somebody, somehow, 
in some way, is going to change everything. But society 
as it exists to-day, whether you look at it politically, morally, 
religiously, or industrially, is a growth, the result of ages 
of growth. You cannot in this off-hand fashion reverse 
or change things. 

I wish to say just a word in regard to these ordinary 
human forces that are at work. One of the most popular 
things that the public speaker can do is to denounce what 
he calls the selfishness of humanity, and call on everybody 
straightway to be something else than what he is. 

But let us look for a moment at this matter of selfishness. 
What does it mean ? It means simply that every man de- 
sires something. He desires food for his body, he desires 
knowledge for the brain, he desires love for the heart. If 



Other Social Dreams 187 

he have a spiritual nature developed, he has that desire 
which we name aspiration for the higher and finer things 
of life. Would you change all this ? Do you call this 
selfish ? If he wants money, you call that selfish. If he 
wants knowledge, is he selfish ? If he wants the object 
of his love, is he selfish ? If he wants spiritual develop- 
ment, wants God, is he selfish ? You appeal to men to seek 
their own welfare, and offer them the bribe of heaven if 
they do, and the threat of hell if they do not. Is that 
appealing to unselfish motives ? We are all astray in the 
misuse of these words " selfish " and " unselfish." If you 
could abolish this fact of human desire, you would abolish 
the universe. The flower desires light and water and fitting 
soil ; and it will struggle pathetically to seek them if you do 
not furnish them. Why does it desire them? That it may 
grow, blossom, and be fragrant and beautiful. A man de- 
sires ; and this desire is the root of all the development, all 
the unfolding, all the beauty and glory of human nature and 
human life. It is only the misuse of this desire which you 
have a right to stigmatize as selfishness and evil. This thing, 
then, that the reformers would abolish, if they could, under 
the name of " selfishness," is the God-given root of all that 
is best, of all that it is possible for anybody to hope for or 
attain. A man takes a high range and grade. How ? 
Why ? By as much as he desires many things and high 
things. You may measure a man by the quantity and qual- 
ity of his desires. Desire, then, is a divine thing, not a 
devilish thing. It is a good thing, not a bad thing. I am 
selfish and wicked only when I wish to interfere with your 
getting the things that you need as the condition of growth. 
I am not selfish in desiring the most and the best that 
I can have myself, provided I do not interfere with your 
desiring and getting, so far as you rightly may, the same. 



1 88 Life 

Now, what is it that the world wants ? What is it that we 
need ? We all dream of, we all want, a better condition of 
things. We are all ready to do what we can to bring it 
about. What really is it that we desire ? We do not desire 
absolute equality. If we desired that, we should desire the 
impossible. It seems to me that, even if I could, I would 
not turn the world into one Illinois prairie, even though the 
level were as high as the tops of the highest mountains. It 
would be dreadfully monotonous. It is the high mountain 
peaks, snow-covered, lightning-smitten many and many a 
time, that are the sources of all the life, beauty, and fertility 
of the valleys. What we really desire is the lifting of human- 
ity above the necessity of everlasting drudgery that keeps 
people from the possibility of being men. A little less work, 
a little more leisure, more time to cultivate the social side of 
us, to develop heart and brain and spirit, — this is really 
what we need. This is the only thing that we need. 

Now are there any practical steps that we can take towards 
this ideal that is so devoutly to be wished ? I cannot go 
into such detail as I would like. I should need an hour to 
adequately deal with what I must put into fifteen minutes. 

The first practical step is one that is in the power of the 
rich. They can do much by following out the line which I 
indicated a Sunday or two ago. The spirit, the temper, which 
they manifest, may have power to change the social climate, 
the atmosphere of human life. The first thing that the rich 
need to do is to let all the world see that they do not claim 
that they have a right to do with their money that which they 
please, but that all they claim is the right to do what is right. 
That is the only right that any man has. Let the rich man, 
then, show the world, the poor, the wage- worker, that he 
recognizes the truth that his money is not an individual, but 
a social fact, and that in some broad, generous sense it be- 



Other Social Dreams 189 

longs to the community, and let him use it for the public 
good, and not for personal and selfish aims, and he may 
change the entire spirit and attitude of the world, so that the 
different classes of society shall recognize each other as 
friends coworking towards some good, high end. This is the 
first thing. 

The next thing I believe to be very important, though it is 
quite impossible to go into detail in treating it : I believe that 
government can do very much to equalize the social burdens 
and lift off the crushing loads of the world and open equal 
opportunities for its citizens. For example, every man who 
studies the matter knows that the burden of taxation is most 
unequal, unfair, and that it frequently presses most heavily 
on those least able to bear it. I do not know how many of 
you agree with me ; but I believe that that form of taxation 
which we call the tariff bears most unequally, most unjustly, 
on the different classes of the community, and that much in 
the way of lightening the burden of society can be done by 
new regulations here. 

Then I believe that much can be done by limiting the 
power of monopolies. Let me be clearly understood. I do 
not think that all monopolies are evil. For example, we say 
high license in the liquor trade creates a monopoly. A mo- 
nopoly of that trade is put into the hands of a few, if we 
carry out the law strictly ; but that is entirely in the interest 
of the public welfare. Monopoly, then, may be a good thing, 
and not a bad thing. In the strictest sense of the word, there 
is no monopoly, and can be no monopoly, except that which 
is established by government. To talk about men as engaged 
in monopolies or railway managers as monopolists is not 
treating the dictionary quite fairly. When the French king, 
an absolute despot, in the olden times selected some favorite 
and gave him the exclusive right to manufacture and sell at 



190 Life 

any price he chose all the gloves, or all the spectacles, or 
whatever it might be, he created a perfect monopoly by so 
doing. But there is nothing that I know of except the fact 
that people do not believe it will pay that prevents their going 
into any business carried on at present in America ; and, so 
long as that is true, no business is a monopoly. But I believe 
that there are immense prerogatives exercised by these men 
who have accumulated great wealth, and who have more 
power thereby, who many a time use that power in unjust and 
oppressive ways, and that government can do much in the 
way of regulating these powers in the interest of all. This 
must be in the way of giving all an equal opportunity. I 
only hint this, because I cannot go into details this morning. 
The third thing is a very important one. It is in the line 
of education. I believe that our public school system in 
America needs radical reform in the interest of the great 
masses of the people. At present, two-thirds at least of the 
children who enter our primary schools are obliged to leave 
school by the time they are ten, twelve, thirteen, or fourteen 
years of age. Our school system is organized ideally to 
begin with the kindergarten and end at Harvard College. 
Yet most of the children are obliged to go a little way, and 
break off without complete training in anything. What is 
the public interested in ? It is in securing the ability on the 
part of all its boys and girls for honest self-support. Indus- 
trial education ought to be put on an equality with the ordi- 
nary education of the brain, as it is called. It ought to be 
the first aim of our public education to make all the children 
capable of self-support. The next aim ought to be to give 
so much of intelligence to all the children that they shall 
be able to cast a wise ballot, to know what they are doing. 
Third, all the children ought to be educated in the funda- 
mental principles of right and wrong, so that they need not 



Other Social Dreams 191 

ignorantly go astray. These three things ought to be the 
great aims of the public schools. For lack of intelligence, 
people are perpetually trying over and over again exploded 
theories, ways of helping on the world, just because they 
do not know any better. They follow a road that has 
proved over and over again to lead to the land of Nowhere. 
They are attempting methods as absurd as a man's attempt- 
ing to lift himself from the earth, because they do not know 
that a thousand years ago all of these were tried and found 
to be impossible. These common experiences of the race 
ought to be made common property, so that effort and 
money and enthusiasm need no longer be wasted on im- 
practical schemes. 

Then one more thing, one of the most important. Every 
wise student of the recent history of the world knows that 
the greatest additions to the world's wealth have come along 
the lines of invention and discovery. There has been more 
wealth added to England and America during the last fifty 
years — I think I am not wrong in making the statement — 
than in the previous five hundred ; and that is almost en- 
tirely due to the immense expansion of the inventive genius 
of man and our additional knowledge of and our control of 
the forces of nature. Now, whatever will stimulate this 
inventive faculty ought to be encouraged. He who makes 
a discovery or an invention ought to be paid so liberally for 
it that all the world will be eager to attain a like reward. 
Suppose Mr. Edison or Mr. McCormick or the inventor of 
the sewing-machine have become millionnaires, the millions 
which are paid to them for their inventions are as a drop in 
the bucket compared to the world of wealth which they 
conferred upon mankind. There ought, then, to be the 
highest rewards offered to those who thus add magnificently 
to the world's wealth. For never forget that any social 



192 Life 

theory that comes to you, offering anything else as a panacea 
except an immense increase of the world's wealth, is sure to 
fail. There is not wealth enough now, and before the world 
can be released from its drudgery there must be ways found 
of creating more ; for this wealth is the only angel of God 
that ever did or ever can release man from drudgery or set 
him free to cultivate the higher sides of his being. 

Since, then, so large an amount of the world's wealth has 
come in this direction, let us do all we can to stimulate this 
inventive activity of the world; for I believe we have only 
tapped the surface as yet. We have gained a little control 
over steam, a very much less amount of control over elec- 
tricity. We have only begun to find out what they can do 
for us. There are boys now living who will leave New York 
or Boston in the morning and be in San Francisco the next 
night, carried there with perfect safety. There are boys now 
living who will cross the Atlantic in four, perhaps three, 
days ; and I should not be surprised if there were boys now 
living who will navigate the air. We are only on the shore 
of these discoveries that are going to put the great forces of 
nature easily in our control, and make us not slaves of a 
plot of ground for a pittance of bread, but kings of the earth 
and of the air as well. 

One other point I must touch. I believe that the next 
step industrially will be that which has been called "the capi- 
talization of labor." Industry began in slavery. It took 
the next step through feudalism, serfdom. We are now in 
the third stage, that of freedom of contract and the payment 
of wages. Those indiscreet people who talk about wage- 
workers as being as badly off as slaves are impatient. They 
do not stop to think what they are talking about. We have 
made a great advance on any condition that the industrial 
world was ever in in the past ; but I believe that the wage- 



Other Social Dreams 193 

worker does not as yet receive his proportionate amount of 
product. I do not say fair amount \ for, if the capitalist is 
going to take all the risk and assure the wage-worker of his 
wage whether the capitalist makes money or not, the wage- 
worker must not wonder if he takes a little more than his 
proportion of the product as payment, not only for the use of 
his money, but for the risk of his capital. What is capital ? 
Anything which now exists, which may be made the instru- 
ment of further production, can fairly be looked upon as 
capital. My hand, if skilled, my brain, my physical strength, 
whatever I know or can do, — these are rightly named 
"capital," as much so as my neighbor's thousand dollars. 
Suppose, then, I agree with the man who has the money, 
and say I put into the business my skill of hand, my brain, 
my knowledge, my experience, not as a wage-worker, but as 
capital, and I agree to take out of the product my propor- 
tionate share of what is produced, and I agree to take my 
share of the risk, also, as payment for this additional share 
of the product that I am going to receive. When men have 
risen to this point, — and I believe they will rise to it, — the 
wage-system will be a thing of the past, as feudalism is ; and 
all men, according to their degree of skill and ability, will 
become capitalists, and there will be no more talk about 
labor and capital, because all men will be laborers and 
capitalists alike. I believe this is going to be the next step 
— I do not say it dogmatically — in the industrial progress 
of the world. 

And now at the close I believe that this world is capable 
of not only supporting all its inhabitants, but of lifting 
them up into the heart and brain and the soul that constitute 
all that is worthy of manhood. I believe that the grandest 
dream is capable of realization ; but it must come along these 
lines of the conquest of the world and of patient labor. 



194 Life 

And, when each individual is developed to the highest and 
best, then, and then only, shall we realize the only socialism 
that is attainable or even desirable. For, when you have a 
world of developed individuals, they will learn, as they are 
gradually learning to-day, that they cannot and do not live 
alone, that there is one grand, mutual interdependence spring- 
ing out of the fact that we are men ; and we shall learn, as we 
are learning gradually, that no man can be happy, no man can 
be rich, no man can be prosperous, all by himself, that he 
receives and gives, and that it is only in the exercise of this 
union of, faculties that help each other that we become the 
most of which we are capable. So there is no contradiction, 
and cannot be, between your welfare and mine ; for, when 
I am helping you to attain the most and the best, I am exer- 
cising just those faculties of my nature which make me most 
human and most like God. 



MORALITIES AND MORALITY. 



I received a letter, about a week ago, which is the type 
of large numbers that come to me. It indicates, along with 
its fellows, the wide-spread confusion that there has been in 
the popular mind as to the standard and the sanctions of 
ethics, — that is, as to what is right and what is wrong, — as 
to how we know what is right and what is wrong, — as to what 
will happen to us if we do right or do wrong. There is no 
generally admitted or widely accepted standard in regard to 
this ; hence, naturally, confusion. 

The gentleman who wrote this letter put his question 
somewhat in this form. He says, If you do not believe in 
the infallibility of the Bible, if you do not accept the doc- 
trine of hell, then what reason have you left for deciding as 
to what is right or what is wrong, and as to what are the 
sanctions of right and wrong ? And where do rewards and 
penalties come in ? In other words, he is in the state of 
mind occupied, I suppose, still by thousands and thousands 
of persons who believe that if suddenly the Bible should be 
lost, and the world should come to lose its belief in everlast- 
ing punishment, we should be all afloat as to what we ought 
to do and as to why we ought to do it ; that there is no 
reason for right or wrong except the command of a book, 
the arbitrary external law of an external and arbitrary power. 

I wish to call your attention to several phases of this con- 



196 Life 

fusion before I attempt to make plain to you what seems to 
me the one pathway out of it. This man, I say, is the type 
of thousands who believe that the only reason for conduct is 
faith in the infallibility of book revelation. And yet let me 
ask you to note whether those who believe in the book reve- 
lation are agreed as to what is right and what is wrong. In 
other words, does the book furnish even to those who claim 
to accept it an unquestioned and clear standard of right and 
wrong ? 

One of the most noteworthy things, I think, is that the 
persons who most strenuously insist upon the infallibility of 
the Bible, and who look upon it and it alone as furnishing 
the standard of right and wrong, continually claim, week by 
week and year by year, that we ought to do no end of things 
that the Bible does not say anything about. And they over- 
look persistently, and persistently neglect to pay any sort of 
attention to, any number of things that the Bible insists upon 
with the utmost plainness and earnestness. That is, those 
who claim to take the New Testament as their standard of 
right and wrong do not abide by it themselves. Why, then, 
should they insist upon others accepting it ? or why should 
they claim that, when it is taken away, nothing of any conse- 
quence is left ? 

Let me illustrate by one or two things. You will note care- 
fully, because I do not wish to be misunderstood, that I am 
not raising the question whether certain things are right or 
wrong just now, but only whether they are commanded by 
the New Testament. Most of the persons who claim to take 
this as their one infallible guide and standard insist upon 
our observance of the first day of the week as a sacred and 
holy day. And in many cases you will find that they will 
forgive a breach of the moral law, an unkindness toward 
a neighbor, a slander, a falsehood, a bit of dishonesty in 



Moralities and Moi'ality 197 

business, — they will forgive that which is really a wrong, 
an injury to somebody, — much more readily than they will 
forgive one who dares to differ from their idea as to how 
Sunday ought to be observed. But yet — note, I am not 
saying whether it is right or wrong, good or bad, to keep 
Sunday — the New Testament has no command whatever on 
the subject. So, if any one chooses to keep Sunday, he can- 
not offer any New Testament authority for so doing. Take 
another illustration. The New Testament commands in the 
most express terms possible that people shall love not only 
their neighbors and their friends, but that they shall love 
their enemies, pray for those who persecute them, be tender 
and kindly towards those who despitefully and evilly entreat 
them ; and yet I venture to say that the great majority of 
those who hold the New Testament as a final authority and 
arbiter in matters of right and wrong are oftener seen dis- 
liking or trying positively to injure such, or looking on at 
least with complacency and a little secret gladness when they 
find them stumbling and falling. On the other hand, what 
an outcry there was only a little while ago, how the papers 
rang with it, and how popular indignation was roused by the 
fact that an Orthodox clergyman in one of the towns of 
this State, refused to call a physician when his little child 
was sick, trusting to prayer for the healing of the child ! 
Nearly all those who claim the New Testament as the stand- 
ard of right and wrong were as indignant as they could be 
over what seemed to them cruelty and barbarism. Yet the 
New Testament explicitly commands those who accept it as 
authority and guide that they shall do precisely what this 
clergyman did. 

The New Testament forbids going to law with a brother 
Christian. How many people who take the New Testament 
as authority ever think of obeying a command like that ? It 



198 Life 

forbids absolutely and in express terms the taking of an 
oath ; but there is hardly a Christian in America who can be 
permitted to testify on the witness-stand without the taking 
of an oath, and no man can hold office without the most 
formal acceptance of an oath as a part of his installation to 
the office. 

I speak of these things simply to illustrate the point that 
those who claim the New Testament as the standard of 
right and wrong commit real wrongs without thinking, with- 
out being troubled in their consciences one whit, apparently, 
while they insist upon our doing as necessary and right all 
sorts of things that the New Testament does not command 
at all. 

Turn to another branch of the Christian Church as a 
further illustration. Take the Roman Catholic Church. The 
Catholic Church does not look to the Bible as its standard, 
but to church teaching and church tradition. It claims that 
the spirit of God resides in the organization, and so the 
Church itself is the standard and guide. But any one who 
reads the history of the Catholic Church even superficially 
will note this fact : that it has been and is now in many cases 
very lenient towards injuries, towards real wrongs, towards 
sins which men commit against each other. One can get 
over this very easily in dealing with the authorities of the 
Church ; and yet it is very strict in regard to its own sacra- 
ments, in regard to keeping its own ritual and laws, in re- 
gard to such matters as the eating of meat on a Friday, in 
regard to the keeping of its fasts. In other words, it has 
established a standard apart from any consideration of the 
real rights and wrongs of men and women as they are living 
here in this world ; and it insists upon the doing of those 
things that are not in any vital relation to the real welfare 
of men even more vigorously than those things which, as 



Moralities and Morality 199 

the result of experience, are proved to be the conditions of 
human welfare. 

Take one brief illustration in another department. I have 
used it before ; but it is a capital illustration on a point 
which I wish to make clear to you. 

I have an acquaintance in this city, — a lady. I have noth- 
ing whatever to say against her. I wish simply to point out 
the mental peculiarity which is the result of her ecclesias- 
tical training, as to her idea of what God requires of her, as 
to what is right and what is wrong. I think I could find 
defects in her character, in her relations to her friends, in 
the matter of duty between her and her neighbors, the same 
kind of defects that I could find in any of us ; and yet these 
do not trouble her conscience particularly, any more than 
they trouble the consciences of the rest of us. But she was 
so troubled in regard to the matter of her attending relig- 
ious services during Lent that, when her sister suddenly 
died, she gravely told me that she believed the death of 
that sister was God's judgment upon her for not attending 
these religious services. 

Let me give one personal illustration from my own boy- 
hood experience. I became a member of the Congregational 
church when I was thirteen years old. We had among 
others what was called a monthly meeting, a preparatory 
lecture, or a monthly conference meeting, preparatory to the 
celebration of the Lord's Supper, which was to come on the 
following Sunday. It was the very hardest thing I had to 
do as a church member during those days to attend that 
meeting, because I knew that I should be called upon to 
speak, to say something in regard to my religious feelings 
and experiences \ and I was timid to the point of making 
this actual torture. I remember that, when I did not do it, 
however, my conscience troubled me more seriously for that 



200 Life 

than for anything else that I can recall during my entire boy- 
hood. Anger, unkindness, injury, neglect of the wishes or 
welfare of father and mother, — none of these things touched 
my conscience half as much as failure to attend that partic- 
ular meeting. I speak of this simply to illustrate how we 
erect these artificial standards, and how many a time the 
things that trouble us, that press upon our consciences most, 
are the things that, when you clearly weigh the welfare, the 
happiness, the prosperity of the world, are light as dust in 
the balance, perhaps of no importance whatsoever. 

If you go outside of Christianity on all these questions, 
you will find even more confusion. The different religions 
of the world have their own standards as to what is right 
and what is wrong. And, strangely enough, — so strangely 
that at first sight it makes one raise the question whether 
man is a moral being at all, — there is hardly a conceivable 
crime on earth that at some time or somewhere in the history 
of some religion has not been consecrated as a part of the 
demanded service that must be paid to a goddess or a god. 
Murder, in the form of human sacrifice, has been one of the 
commonest of these duties. And so I might go through the 
whole catalogue, and there is hardly a crime that has not 
somewhere and at some time been a religious and moral 
duty, according to the standard then prevailing. 

What does this all mean ? Does it mean that conscience 
is of no account ? that conscience is only a paid attorney, 
ready to take a fee from any one who will pay the highest, 
and be in favor of this or that master according to what 
seems its interest? Does it mean that there is no perma- 
nent right or wrong in the world, that there is no eternal 
ethical standard in the light of which we are bound ? I have 
had friends sometimes go so far as to seriously raise that 
question with me, since I have been in Boston, — not bad peo- 



Moralities and Morality 201 

pie at all, some of them the best people I have ever known. 
They have been confused, so confused that they have said 
to me, Isn't it true, after all, that right and wrong are mere 
matters of climate and of stages of culture ? That which is 
wrong in Boston is right enough in Turkey. The American 
mother takes the most tender and loving care of her little 
child. The Hindu mother as conscientiously takes her little 
child and casts it to the crocodile in the Ganges. The son 
or the daughter in Boston considers it not only the most 
sacred of all obligations, but generally, I am glad to say, the 
deepest and highest of all joys, to take tender and loving 
care of father and mother, as they get old and can no longer 
take care of themselves. But every student of anthropology 
knows that there have been peoples on the earth, and that 
there are even yet, who as soon as father and mother get a 
little decrepit and old consider it the highest obligation to 
put them remorselessly to death. Is there, then, no standard 
for us? What does conscience mean ? 

In reply to this, let me make perfectly clear to you what 
is true concerning this much abused matter of conscience. 

You know people, no matter what theory they may hold 
upon this subject, who are conscientiously just as wrong as 
they can be ; that is, they are according to your deepest con- 
victions. How, then, can you talk about conscience being a 
divine faculty that resides in the soul as the guide for man in 
matters of right and wrong? If one man goes conscien- 
tiously west and another conscientiously east, and still other 
people are going just as conscientiously to every other point 
of the compass, each claiming that he is going in the only 
possible right direction, how can you claim that conscience 
is a guide ? 

A little clear thinking will show you tfeat in regard to the 
matter as to what is right and what is wrong conscience is 



202 Life 

not a guide at all, and never was intended to be. What is 
the divine thing, the permanent thing, in any conscience ? 
It is simply the everlasting witness of the divine in us as to 
our obligation to do right. Conscience forever rings in our 
hearts the one command of moral obligation : Do right, do 
right, do right ! But no man's conscience ever told him, 
since the world began, what was right or what was wrong. 
What is right and what is wrong, these have been learned as 
the results of human experience, precisely as any other truth 
has been learned since the world was. And the man is in 
great peril, peril of injuring himself, peril of being unkind 
and injurious to his neighbor, who makes his present con- 
science the judgment-seat before which he dares call any 
other soul for sentence. You think that a certain course of 
conduct is the right, and the only right, one : then you are 
bound by it. But, unless you can bring some better reason 
than merely that you think so, you have no business to 
judge any other soul that lives. Conscience gives you no 
authority. You have a right to say to any man, You are 
under obligation to do right ; but, before you have a right to 
bring him up to your standard, you are under the highest 
possible obligation to prove to him that your standard is cor- 
rect ; but your thinking so at the moment is no proof what- 
ever that it is correct. Here have come in half of the cruel- 
ties, half of the falsities, half of the injustices of the world, 
— the lack of charity, the bitterness, the injury to the social 
and the moral world. I think I am right; and I presume 
to erect that into a throne and order the rest of my family, 
my neighbors, my friends, to come before me for sentence. 
Insolent egotism ! I have no right to do anything of the 
sort. 

What is the standard of right and wrong ? Is there one ? 
Right here I wish to do what I know some of you do not like 



Moralities and Morality 203 

to have me do ; that is, read a passage instead of speak. But 
I must read this because it is so important in its bearing on 
this question, and because of the person who wrote it. It 
is in the January number of the Forum, and is from an 
article on " The Ethics of Marriage," by W. S. Lilly, one 
of the most brilliant essayists living, a devout and earnest 
Roman Catholic. See what he says as to the standard of 
ethics : — 

" The ethics taught by Christianity are not, as Mr. John 
Morley somewhere calls them, ' a mere appendage to a set of 
theological mysteries.' They are independent of those mys- 
teries, and would subsist to all eternity, though Christianity 
and all religions were swept into oblivion." (Think of a 
Catholic saying that !) " The moral law is ascertained, not 
from the announcements of prophets, apostles, evangelists, 
but from a natural and permanent revelation of the reason. 
' Natural reason,' says Suarez, in his great treatise, De Legi- 
bus, ' indicates what is in itself good or bad for men ' ; or, 
as elsewhere in the same work he expresses it, ■ Natural 
reason indicates what is good or bad for a rational creature.' 
The great fundamental truths of ethics are necessary, like 
the great fundamental truths of mathematics. They do not 
proceed from the arbitrary will of God. They are unchange- 
able, even by the fiat of the Omnipotent. The moral pre- 
cepts of Christianity do not derive their validity from the 
Christian religion. They are not a corollary from its theo- 
logical creed. It is mere matter of fact, patent to every one 
who will look into his Bible, that Jesus Christ and his apos- 
tles left no code of ethics. The Gospels and Epistles do not 
yield even the elements of such a code. Certain it is that 
when, in the expanding Christian society, the need arose for 
an ethical synthesis, recourse was had to the inexhaustible 
fountains of wisdom opened by the Hellenic mind ; to those 



204 Life 

'Mellifluous streams that watered all the schools 
Of Academics, old and new, with those 
Surnamed Peripatetics, and the sect 
Epicurean and the Stoic severe.' 

"The clearness, the precision of psychological analysis, 
which distinguish the ethics of the Catholic schools, are due 
more to Aristotle and Plato than to Hebrew prophets or 
Christian apostles." 

This is the opinion of a singularly devout, earnest Catho- 
lic. I am glad to say that I could not have put my own 
belief into more precise and forcible words. 

The standard of ethics, of right and wrong, is eternal, is 
unchangeable; but it is not derived from any priest, from 
any prophet, from any apostle, from any bible, from any 
church, from any outside source whatsoever. It is simply 
the constituent law of things. In other words, the law of 
life is the one eternal, unchanging standard of ethics, of 
right and of wrong. I must try to make this clear to you if 
I can. 

Let me call your attention to the fact that we are living 
in the pivotal age of all the centuries. We are at the turn- 
ing-point of the ages. The world, in the future generations, 
will look back to this time as the great crisis of the most 
profound and tremendous revolution of thought that has ever 
taken place. We do not see it, because we are in the midst 
of it, as a man in a regiment, in the smoke of the battle, 
does not see which way the army is moving half as well as 
the general who is on the hill-top overlooking the scene. 

Let me indicate to you the central point of this great 
change. In every religion that the world has ever known in 
the past, the will of God, the standard of right and wrong, 
both religious and moral obligations, have been supposed to 
emanate from an external source. In other words, God has 



Moralities and Morality 205 

been a legislator, a tsar, an emperor, a king, outside of 
things, issuing his decrees, enforcing his laws over all people 
by arbitrary penalties of reward and punishment. What 
change are we passing through? We have reached this 
point, that the great, profound thinkers of the world are 
agreed that there is no God and never has been outside of 
things at all ; that God is the life, the force, the power in 
and through things, no more outside of things than my soul 
is outside of my body. 

Note what follows. If any religion, any priest, any oracle, 
any prophet, any book, any church, has ever truly translated 
into human speech one of God's laws, it has been by as 
much as it has been able to apprehend this interior constitu- 
ent law of things. There is not a single binding law in this 
universe, except the pervasive, universal law of life ; and, if 
any book speaks truly in regard to this, it is by as much as 
it has correctly apprehended and announced one of these 
eternal, unchanging laws of life. Ethics, then, is as all-per- 
vasive and as necessary as the law of gravity. Talk about 
a man escaping an ethical law ! He might as well escape 
his horizon ; for ethical laws are the laws of his life. 

Let me illustrate, if I can, to make clear what I mean. 
Suppose I could draw a circle in your presence. What is 
a circle ? It is a line every point of which is equidistant 
from another point that is called the centre. That statement 
we call the law of the circle. How can you injure, harm, or 
by figure of speech sin against a circle ? There is no con- 
ceivable way except by breaking this law which constitutes 
it a circle. If you do that, you destroy it. It ceases to be ! 
You have sinned against its life. Take a river. What is 
a river ? A body of water in a definite current flowing be- 
tween two banks. If you take away the watei or one of the 
banks, or both, if you destroy the conditions, it ceases to be 



206 Life 

a river. You can sin against its life by destroying the condi- 
tions of its existence. Take a tree. There are certain con- 
ditions on which its life, health, and growth depend. How 
can you harm the tree in any possible way except by injuring 
its health, its life, by taking away from its power of growth 
or bearing ? 

Now come to man. What is my body ? It has definite 
outlines : it is constituted what it is by these outlines. Then 
it is made up of certain organs, or parts, in certain definite 
relations to each other ; and the constancy of these relations 
that I speak of is the law of my body. How can you harm 
my body ? There is no possible way of sinning against it or 
injuring it except by lowering the tone of its health, by tak- 
ing away something from its life. And, if you break one of 
the laws that constitute me what I am, you do take away 
from health, you do take away from life. 

Consider the larger organism called the State, or the 
nation, where individuals count, so to speak, as cells, as con- 
stituent parts of this larger organism. How can you injure 
the State ? By such a course of conduct as takes away from 
the life, the prosperity, the power of the State. There is no 
other way of injuring it. Of course, what will injure it will 
depend upon the organization of the State. That which will 
injure an empire might not injure a republic. A course of 
conduct that everybody admits is right here in America is 
condemned in Russia, and rightly so, — that is, provided 
Russia has a right to be. For, of course, you will see that 
here the one supreme sin, politically speaking, is and must 
be treason. You can do anything else, and be forgiven ; but, 
if you sin against the conditions of the existence or life of 
the State, how can you be forgiven ? The State cannot for- 
give that. It is a matter of self-defence, a matter of life to 
the State. 



Moralities and Morality 207 

So, in the Catholic Church, to recur to the illustration 
which I used at the opening, its attitude is perfectly natural 
and right, from the point of view of the pope. You cannot 
expect him to do otherwise. If a church is organized so 
that it puts as the one supreme object its own existence, its 
continuing to be and its retaining its power, why, of course, 
any other sin is venial except that which threatens the power 
and the life of the church itself. Of course, the pope can 
forgive anything else quicker than that. A Catholic may 
murder, and the Church be safe ; and heresy in thought, yes, 
because you can think as you please, and still the Church 
be safe. But heresy spoken threatens the very life of the 
Church ; and of course it cannot be permitted, — anything 
else. 

The only safe church, then, you will see, in accordance 
with this principle, is the church that does not place first its 
own existence, the continuance of it as a denomination, its 
own power, but that church which places the truth first, and 
which links its life with the discovery and acceptance of the 
truth. That is the only safe church on earth, because a 
church organized in any other way must perforce place its 
own rights, its own power, its continued existence, above 
and before all moral laws. Do you not see how it must be 
so? So you take the religions of the world that I have 
spoken of as placing rituals before morals, character, justice, 
— why not ? Suppose I believe in a God outside the nature 
of things, who, looking over this scene, is indifferent to it per- 
haps, and commands me to do certain things on pain of pun- 
ishment in another life. If I really believe that, must I not 
break any and every social law, every political law, if need 
be, for the sake of obeying this God who holds my very life 
and destiny forever in his hands ? Eternity is of infinitely 
more importance than any question that touches this little 



208 Life 

world. Of course, then, this supposed command of a God, 
outside of the nature of things, will supersede any and every 
obligation of which you can conceive for a moment. 

Here, then, you will see is the reason fqr all this confu- 
sion that we have noticed as so general over the world. 
It is because people have gone to some supposed external 
authority — priest, church, book — or some particular social 
order as their standard, instead of going to the heart of 
life, the source of things, and finding the real God and the 
real laws of righteousness where they are, where they always 
have been, and where they must be forever. But you will 
note that all these men in the confusion of the past have 
been blindly seeking after the truth, in spite of their mis- 
takes and failures. They have been always trying to find 
that which they believed right in the largest and highest and 
truest sense. 

Here, then, is the simple fact that life, life as duration, 
life as contents, — that is, as well-being and happiness, — 
is the one standard of right ; and the only wrong you can by 
any possibility commit is a wrong against the well-being, 
the life of a man, a social order, a church, a State, or what- 
ever the life that is being considered may be. The only 
harm you can possibly do is that which is against the life, 
the welfare, of somebody. What this is in any particular 
case must be a matter of study and discovery. We find out 
what is right, what is wrong, or what is bad in an individual 
or the world by experience. 

I was talking of this subject with a friend the other day ; 
and he raised a question of so much importance that I must 
give you the benefit of the discussion between us. He said, 
If life is the one eternal standard, then how does it ever 
come to be that life can be rightly and grandly sacrificed ? 
Where does self-sacrifice come in ? Where does martyrdom 



Moralities and Morality 209 

come in ? I will tell you. The worst sin that I can pos- 
sibly commit against my body is some action which lowers 
the tone of its health, and which, carried far enough, would 
lead to death. I cannot possibly harm my body in any 
other way. Yes ; but I am not body alone. I am mind. 
Now, it is conceivable that there may come such a juncture 
of affairs in my life as that there shall be conflict between 
the physical well-being and the mental, that the mental part 
may be better developed. In sacrificing and injuring, and 
in a sense sinning against, my body, then, I may be only 
sacrificing the lower life to the higher mental life. And that 
may not only be desirable, but grand as well. Or there 
may come a juncture in my life where I need to sacrifice 
the physical and mental both to the affectional life. There 
have been cases where sons have nobly and grandly sacri- 
ficed their physical well-being and a career of study which 
they would love to have had — their mental development — 
for the sake of the higher obligation, as they conceived it, 
and as I conceive it, of being true to the love of father and 
mother or friends dependent on them. Here, again, it is 
life which is the standard, only the higher life supersedes 
the lower. So a man may sacrifice all that he is for the 
sake of a grand conviction, for a mighty truth, in the spirit 
which Jesus had in mind, when he said, " He that loseth 
his life for my sake shall find it," or, as the apostle says, 
referring to Jesus hanging on the cross, "Who for the joy 
that was set before him endured the cross, despising the 
shame." A man may then, for what he believes to be the 
eternal life of the soul, grandly and gladly sacrifice every- 
thing lower, and still not change the standard. He gives up 
the lower life for a fuller, grander life that can be attained 
in no other way. 

Or an individual may sacrifice himself for society, for 



210 Life 

a " cause," as we say, considering himself only a little unit, 
just as I may sacrifice my finger or my arm to save my life. 
If my finger or my arm might be conceived of as intelli- 
gent, as capable of choice, they might be grand enough to 
demand that they be sacrificed to save my life. So a man 
can choose a social life, a politicial life, or the religious life 
of the time, the grander life of the world, instead of his own 
individual life, and may give himself up to the larger life 
of mankind. The lower life, then, the narrower life, may 
be sacrificed without any infringement of the principle that 
I have announced, that the one eternal standard of right 
is life; and that which conduces to the individual life, 
bodily, mental, moral, affectional, spiritual, that which con- 
duces to the larger life of the world, that which leads and 
looks onward and has in it the promise of the coming time, 
is right. That which is against that is wrong ; and nothing 
else can be wrong. 

Right and wrong, then, are to be understood by studying 
the progress, the development, of the race, just as we find 
out any other truth ; and, when you have discovered it, do 
it. And all external authority, Church, Bible, priest, or 
what not, is right, is of authority, only in so far as it rightly 
reads and tran lates this inner eternal law of life. 



RELIGIONS AND RELIGION. 



Because the thought of the early world was ignorant and 
crude, because the religious ideas which were held are now 
regarded as very childish and superstitious, there are a great 
many people who do not think deeply enough to get over 
the impression that religion may be all crudeness, all igno- 
rance, all superstition. It had so lowly a birth, its begin- 
nings were so poor, there was so much of cruelty and bar- 
barity connected with it, that some people wonder whether, 
when the world gets wise and tender-hearted and true, relig- 
ion will not be among the memories of things that have 
passed away. But, by parity of reasoning, why are not the 
heavens blotted out? Why do suns still swing in their 
orbits and stars still shine ? The thought of the early world 
concerning these bright bodies over our heads was very 
crude, very ignorant, very superstitious. They had no more 
correct theory concerning these than they had concerning 
the religious nature and life of man. But we know that 
this does not touch the central facts, the eternal realities, of 
astronomy. Though it be only within two or three hundred 
years that we have begun in any adequate fashion to grasp 
the great truths that these heavenly bodies illustrate and 
convey, still we know that they are the same stars that shone 
upon the early world. No change of theory puts out a single 
sun or dims one single star ray. The great essential truths 



212 Life 

were in the beginning, were at every step of human progress, 
and are to-day undimmed and unchanged. The change, 
perfectly natural, perfectly rational, is only in the growing 
intelligence, and so the broadening thought, of mankind. 

Religion had its birth in the most natural way in the 
world. It was a necessity to early man, as much as it is 
to-day; and the shape which religion took was a perfectly 
natural and necessary shape, considering the nature of man 
and his surroundings. I have very little sympathy with the 
man who can study this past history of the world even in 
its most barbaric, most ignorant, most cruel manifestations, 
without uncovering his head in reverence. I have no sym- 
pathy with the man who can refer to this with a sneer upon 
his lip. It shows a very shallow thought, a very partial 
comprehension of the meaning of this great fact of the relig- 
ious outreaching of the human soul. Primitive man reasoned 
as well as we reason, and precisely in the same way, when 
you take into account the small mental development that he 
had attained, and the small amount of knowledge concerning 
the facts of the universe which he had acquired. Early man, 
then, was just as rational a creature as we are to-day, con- 
sidering his brain development and his circumstances. 

Let us note for a moment how naturally, how necessarily, 
religion sprang up when man first began to think and feel 
as a man. He knew only himself, and himself very incom- 
pletely. The only knowledge he had of any kind of life or 
power was derived from a contemplation of his own nature; 
and he knew of himself only as a conscious individual, pos- 
sessing will and able to exert force. And, whenever he saw 
any movement in the world about him, how else, being what 
he was, could he interpret it except in terms derived from 
contemplation of his own nature ? When man opened his 
eyes and looked out over the world and the heavens above 



Religions and Religion 213 

him, he saw clouds moving, he saw the lightnings, he heard 
the tremendous voice of thunder, he noticed the growth of 
grasses and plants and flowers and trees, he saw the brooks 
rushing down the hillsides, he saw all the mighty movements, 
the mysterious forces of the world around him ; and he was 
obliged to translate these into terms of will and personality. 
And he was not so far wrong as some shallow wise men of 
the world even yet imagine, in my opinion. He thought 
that all these were living things, and he was right ; for we 
to-day believe that the universe is living all through, only 
his error — a natural one — was in attributing individual 
personality to these separate manifestations of the one force 
and life that is the soul of things. And when, through what- 
ever course of reasoning, — I cannot go into it this morning, 
— he came to think of some one of these mysterious powers 
as his god, as he came to think of himself in personal rela- 
tion to this power, — perhaps thinking of this power as the 
ancestor of his tribe and of himself as one of the tribe, — as 
he came to think of this mighty force able to hurt him, able 
to help him, a force on whose will he depended for life, for 
breath, for all things, do you not see how naturally the relig- 
ion which he adopted would blossom out into the forms that 
it actually did assume ? 

Not only was religion a natural and a necessary growth of 
the early world, but the multiplicity of religions was just as 
natural and necessary a result of the condition in which prime- 
val man found himself. He had no conception of the unity of 
the world, the unity of the human race, the unity of these man- 
ifold forces that impressed themselves upon him on every 
hand. How could he have ? And, when he looked round 
him at the members of his own tribe, he had come, in ways 
which I need not stop to enumerate, to think of this tribe 
as all akin, having descended from one common ancestor, with 



214 Life 

one blood flowing through the veins of all the members ; and 
within the limits of this kinship, this family, this tribe, he 
lived his life. He did not think of himself as standing in 
any sort of relation of right or wrong or of love towards 
the members of any other tribe. His own tribe was the 
scene of his life and the field of his activity. His conscience 
would not trouble him if he killed the member of some other 
tribe or took away his property by force or violence, or ren- 
dered any injury whatever. But within the limits of his own 
tribe, within the limits of this supposed kinship, he felt him- 
self bound by obligations of right and wrong as strong, for 
the time, as those which we feel to-day. Each one of these 
tribes had its own god, a god that had nothing whatever to 
do with the gods of any other tribe. Moab might worship 
his god, the Philistine might worship his god, the Assyrian 
might worship his god, the Egyptian might worship his god ; 
but Israel felt under no obligation to pay any worship to 
these deities, even although believing them real, as real as 
his own. I speak of this simply as illustrating what was 
true of all families and tribes of men in the early periods 
of human history. Each man felt under obligation to wor- 
ship his own god ; and so far in those days were religions 
from having or manifesting anything like a missionary or 
proselyting spirit that it was not supposed to be right even 
for the member of one tribe to have anything whatever to 
do with the religion of another tribe. The only way by 
which an alien or a foreigner could come to share the wor- 
ship of another tribe was by the process of being adopted 
into that tribe ; that is, by feigning, or making, the fact of 
kinship which was the one only tie that bound them to each 
other, and which bound them to their god. 

This condition of things you will see was perfectly natural, 
entirely necessary at that stage of human development. 






Religions and Religion 215 

And here let me say a word — for these old superstitions 
and misconceptions do so persist — concerning the question 
as to whether there is one true religion while all the rest are 
false. 

I was brought up to suppose that there was only one real 
and true religion, and that all the rest were delusions, forg- 
eries of devils or of designing priests and founders. I was 
brought up to suppose that Mahomet, for example, was a 
conscious impostor, instead of being, as now I hold, in his 
degree and according to his light, as much a prophet and 
reformer as any of the great religious founders of mankind. 
Milton, you will perhaps remember, represents all the false 
religions as being the inventions of fallen angels, they try- 
ing in this way to interfere with the worship of the one true 
God, thus to lead men astray to their destruction. This has 
been the common idea. I think, when we become more in- 
telligent, less prejudiced, we shall come to the conclusion 
that all the religions of the world, including even our own 
Christianity, are equally natural outgrowths of the religious 
yearning and need of the human heart ; that they are all 
members of one family, all divine so far as they have at- 
tained the truth, all lacking in divinity so far as they still 
cherish errors and misconceptions. 

Let me turn from this point and raise another question. 
What were these men trying to gain by their religions ? In 
other words, what has been the aim since the world was of 
this religious life of man ? What has man sought in trying 
to worship his gods ? Why has he sought them after this 
method or that? one way in Asia, another way in Africa, 
another way in Europe, perhaps yet another way in America ? 
What has man been trying to do ? 

He has been trying from the very beginning, — and this 
ought to give us an added respect and sympathy for him, — 



216 Life 

he has been trying to do precisely what we are trying to do 
here this morning. No matter how crude, no matter how 
bloody, how barbaric, how superstitious the religious mani- 
festation has been, it has been, at the first at any rate, an 
earnest effort after God, a trying to find this power that 
presses on man on every side and still eludes him at every 
turn, a trying to find out the nature of this power that was 
here before he was born, on which he depends, that will 
remain forever while the generations of men come and go. 
Man has always been trying to find out the nature of this 
power, to find out the relation in which he stood to this 
power, to find out what this power wanted of him. In other 
words, man has always been searching after the secret of 
life, more life, fuller life, life filled up with good, life ever 
growing more and better. Study any religion you please, 
and you will find that the people of that time have formed 
the best thought they could concerning this mysterious 
power outside of them ; they have had the best thought they 
were capable of having, and they have tried to find out the 
way by which they might ward off his supposed anger, by 
which they might win his favor, by which they might get into 
such relations to him that life, peace, prosperity, growth, 
should be theirs. That is what men have always been trying 
to do, whatever name they have used in addressing the un- 
seen power, by whatever rites or ceremonies they have sought 
to approach him. They have ever been seeking this one 
aim as wisely as they knew. 

I wish to emphasize and to clarify this thought a little by 
referring to two or three specific types of religion, that you 
may see how necessary these types have been, and how they 
illustrate the point that I have just made. 

Men have felt the presence of this invisible power, and as 
I just told you have ever had the best thought about it which 



Religions and Religion 217 

their stage of development was capable of. But you will 
note that religions have taken these different shapes in 
accord with the different theories of things which men have 
held. It is no accident that the first word of Genesis is a 
scientific word. The first word of every religion on earth 
is a scientific word. That is, men have begun of necessity 
with some sort of thinking about the nature of things, and 
the theory which they have come to adopt has been their 
theology, the framework of their religious life. 

Let me give you now one of the crudest and lowest with 
which we are acquainted. I do not know but all men have 
passed through this stage. I am inclined to think they have, 
though I do not speak dogmatically on this point. If you 
will go back far enough, you will find that the men of that 
period believed that the animal forms around them were just 
as divine as they themselves were, or as this mysterious 
power which they thought of as their god. You will find 
that these tribes believed that it was one common life shared 
by the god and the animal which they took as their totem. 
That is, they believed there was a real vital kinship between 
their deity and this particular animal and their tribe, and 
this animal stood as the sacred representative of their divin- 
ity. They believed that the one life coursed through them 
all. And to keep this life vital, full, there was only one way ; 
and here is the origin of sacrifices. I can only hint this 
truth, which requires volumes to explain and make clear. 
The origin of animal sacrifices is undoubtedly here. When 
any calamity occurred to the tribe, or when for one reason or 
another they thought that their god was losing interest in 
them or was a little further away from them, and they 
wished to tighten the bonds that bound them in this one 
kinship with the divine power, on which their prosperity 
depended, then they would put to death one of these sacred 



21 8 Life 

animals that contained the life of the god ; and they and the 
god together in the sacrificial feast would drink the blood of 
this animal and eat its flesh, and so renew the bonds of this 
common life which was shared by them all. A remnant 
of this we find in the old Arab idea of the inviolable sacred- 
ness of the bond that binds you to the man with whom you 
have eaten. 

I have no time to explain it ; but the Lord's Supper is only 
the last and most refined development of this same primi- 
tive thought of man. Man believed that he partook of the 
life of that of which he ate, that he became like it. By 
eating, as he believed, with god, he renewed afresh the bond 
which together they shared in this common life. 

Now, do you not see that, if men have reached the stage 
of culture where they have no higher idea of God than this, 
this method of approaching him, of getting into right rela- 
tions with him, is as natural and necessary as are our 
methods to us ? 

Let me ask you to look for a moment at Buddhism as an 
illustration of another type of religion. What did the Buddh- 
ist think ? At first, he did not think much about the god or 
the gods ; but he believed that in some way the individual 
soul had become entangled in this mesh of personal existence 
which was an evil. The Buddhist teaches that to escape 
personal desire, personal ambition, personality in all its 
forms, is the only deliverance for man. In some way, per- 
haps, he does not know how to explain it, each soul is hin- 
dered in its career by being born over and over again, a 
series of reincarnations, — perpetually bound, as he expresses 
it, to this wheel of life, now up in the sunshine, now down 
in the dark, unable to extricate himself and escape, or to 
find repose and calm. This is the Buddhist theory of the 
universe and of the relation of the individual to it ; and what 



Religions and Religion 219 

Euddha claimed was to teach the way by which a man might 
lessen the number of these incarnations, and some way 
escape them altogether and reach Nirvana, a period or place 
of annihilation possibly, at any rate of the absorption of the 
individual consciousness, and so escape from all this turmoil 
and trouble, this up and down of human life. 

What is the Christian theory, the theory of the last five 
hundred years ? You know perfectly well, I need not re- 
count it to you, what this theory is, — the fall of man, the 
anger of God, the necessity of placating him and of deliver- 
ing the individual soul from his wrath, the whole to issue in 
hell or in heaven as an eternal condition of affairs. Do you 
not see that here is first, no matter how it sprung up, this 
theory, this conception of things ? And that religion, which 
is this outreaching after God, must of necessity take these 
various shapes according to the thought of the world as to 
the universe, as to God, as to man, as to the relation in 
which we stand to God, as to the desirable outcome of life ? 

But, as the world goes on, there is a constant tendency 
towards unity. One of the next movements of the human 
brain and human heart is towards the discovery of some 
central principle in which shall be unified all the appar- 
ent diversity of things. So, through a perfectly natural 
process, the world has gone on from the belief in many relig- 
ions and many gods to one religion and one god. First, the 
Hebrews believed that their god was only their tribal deity, 
and that other gods insisted rightly on the worship of their 
own people. Then they came to believe that their god was 
the only God, and that all the others were vain imaginings 
of ignorant people ; and, as the result of the scientific de- 
velopment of the world, unity is, as we know, put beyond 
all question. The universe, infinite in its range and sweep, 
has become simplicity itself so far as the materials of which 



220 Life 

it is made are concerned. We know that the same sub- 
stance we tread under our feet, the dust of this earth, is the 
same as that which shines in the stars, which makes up the 
composition of every separate planet. We know that the 
universe is one in substance. When Newton discovered 
the law of gravity, he proved that it is one power, one hand, 
that holds the galaxies and systems in one grasp, reducing 
the whole complexity to marvellous simplicity. Modern 
science has gone on to demonstrate that all the multiplicity 
of forces that we call light, heat, electricity, and what not, 
are only varieties of one force, only differences in the mode 
of motion that moves forever and is never weary. So we 
have one universe at last, and one God. 

Another subject which I hinted to you last Sunday, and 
which I wish to recur to this morning, is this. The God of 
the universe is no longer outside of it, but in it, — its life, its 
thought, its conscious will, its purpose, its soul. And here 
let me point out the fact that the crudest and most ignorant 
savage was not so very far astray. He thought all these 
things were alive. The error that he committed was in think- 
ing there were so many different kinds of lives. He was right 
in saying that they were all alive ; for the latest word of phi- 
losophy and science is that this power which is manifested 
through the universe on every hand is the same power that 
lives in the individual, in the form of conscious will. So the 
barbaric man, in thinking that the world was all alive, and 
in thinking that his God was of kin to him, was not wrong ; 
for it is this power, this divineness all through the universe, 
that is in us and makes us alive. 

We have reached a point now where we are ready to take 
the next great step, which in one sense is to be the final 
step, in the growth of the world's religion. We must drop 
the u s" and no longer talk about "religions," but say "re- 



Religious and Religion 221 

ligion " ; for, just as there has always been one theory con- 
cerning the universe, the stars over our heads, that was true 
from the beginning, while none of the others were true, so 
there has always been only one truth about God, one truth 
about man. So there never has been but one religion, in the 
true sense of that word, and never could have been, and 
never can be, — only one religion from the beginning ; and 
men feeling about in the twilight of the world were simply 
in their crude and ignorant way seeking after it, feeling after 
God, as Paul said, if haply they might find him, though he 
be not far from each one of us. There has, then, been but 
one true religion from the beginning, and all the attempts of 
men in groping after this have only been glimpses of broken 
lights that have preceded the dawn. 

But, though a belief in the unity of the universe and the 
oneness of God has been attained, the multiplicity of relig- 
ious theories still remains. Even in Christianity, is it not 
true — I beg you not to misunderstand me — that there are 
a good many different religions ? God is not the same God 
to the Romanist that he is to the Protestant, though the 
same word be used. God is not the same being to the 
Orthodox that he is to the Unitarian, though we spell the 
same name with the three same letters. Religion, after all, 
is constituted by this theory of things that we hold. The 
Orthodox hold that man is a fallen being. Until within a 
few years they have held that man has been on this earth 
only a little while ; that God hates man ; that it is only 
through the sacrifice of Jesus Christ that God is made mer- 
ciful and ready to forgive ; that some of us are going to be 
saved and the rest of us are going to be lost. On the other 
hand, liberal Unitarians believe that man has been in this 
world uncounted ages; that he has never fallen; that God 
has never hated him ; that he loves and always has loved 



222 Life 

him, and given him all the light which he was capable of re- 
ceiving ; that he has led him all the way and is leading, no 
matter by what name he is called by man ; that man does 
not need to be saved from a fall or from the wrath of God, 
he only needs to be saved from ignorance, from passion, 
from hate and selfishness, from the evil of animal qualities 
still in him ; that he needs to be educated, lifted, developed, 
and to be brought into accord with the real truth of God and 
the nature of things. 

Now, how can you rationally speak of these two as the 
same religion ? No matter if they both be called " Chris- 
tian," or if they both speak of God and use the same word 
for his name. The two religions are utterly unlike and 
utterly inconsistent with each other. This new religion we 
know, not to be perfect truth, but, to be approximately truer 
than any other ; for there can be but one true religion, and 
what must that be ? 

It can be only one thing. It must start, in the first 
place, with as correct a theory as we can get of the universe, 
with the best theory that science has given us. Then it 
must have as correct a thought as possible concerning God, 
as to what kind of being he is, and what he desires of us, 
what he wants us to do. Then the practical part of it on 
our side must be to get into the right relation with God, to 
comply with his laws, to grow into harmony with him, to be 
reconciled to him. This is the one civilized, reasonable 
religion on the face of the earth, and along these lines it 
must go : it can no other. For, note, God is in the universe 
now, not outside of it ; he is issuing no laws from without : 
the only laws of God are the vital, constituent laws of the 
universe. There are no arbitrary, externally imposed laws. 
If any priest, any prophet, any church, any book, has ever 
uttered one syllable of divine revelation, to this must it 
come for judgment; and it is divine only as it agrees with 



Religions and Religion 223 

the eternal truth and nature of things. There is, indeed, 
a revelation, and there is coming an infallible revelation ; for 
the infallible revelation is just the progressively discovering 
and demonstrating of truth in the heavens above and the 
earth beneath, in the past and the present, to the human 
brain and for the unfolding of human society, and there is 
no revelation except this. If then, as I said, any church, 
book, or priest, has ever uttered a syllable of claimed revela- 
tion, it is revelation only if it is true, and if it agrees with 
this eternal truth of the nature of things. Here, then, is to 
come at last infallibility, — not the infallibility of an external, 
imposed law, but the infallibility of discovered truth. 

Now, as regards this truth in its external manifestation 
in worship, what shall I say ? The Church may organize 
itself as it pleases so as to make itself most efficient for its 
work : it may use any rites, services, forms of worship, cere- 
monies, it pleases, only provided that they express and help 
the religious life, and are not dead forms and made substi- 
tutes for life. 

Another thing. In the light of this grand truth of the one- 
ness of religion and of its natural revelation in the unfolding 
truth of things, there is the grand hope that in the future 
there need be no more cataclysms, no more revolutions, no 
more persecutions, no more overturnings ; but, with the 
heart open for a larger love, with the life open for a grander 
character, with the brain open for the newer truth, mankind 
may march on step by step through the years, ever seeing 
more and more of the divinity of things, ever growing to 
a comprehension and a practice of these higher truths, and 
so reaching on towards the perfect light of a perfect day. 
And, when this is attained, it will mean perfect truth of 
thought, perfection of conduct, and all-inclusive love, the 
very kingdom of God realized among men. 



WHAT IS IT ALL FOR? 



At the outset, I ask you to go with me while we take 
a rapid survey of the course of human progress on this 
planet. You will readily see that what I propose is only 
a very general and rough outline, in order that I may bring 
this general course of life vividly to your attention, that you 
may be ready with me to consider the question, What is it 
all for ? 

You are familiar with the nebular theory, in accordance 
with which many thousands, perhaps millions, of years ago 
this old earth of ours cooled down until it became a fit place 
for the abode of life ; and this life came, first, in the very 
lowest forms. For a series of ages, life slowly climbed from 
one form to another, up through fishes, reptiles, birds, and 
mammals, — uncounted ages before man himself appeared. 
And aU this while, as though there were a providence at 
work guiding the course of this development, the world was 
being stored with the rough materials out of which the com- 
ing civilization was to be wrought. Coal beds were laid 
down, veins of ore deposited, and the whole planet was made 
the apparently inexhaustible storehouse of forces that only 
waited the discovery and application of intelligence to trans- 
form them into the readily trained, tireless servants of 
humanity. At last man appeared. Then — who shall tell 
for how many years, how many thousands of years? — his 



What is it all for? 225 

progress was so slow that we can hardly speak of him as 
human, cannot speak of him at all as civilized. Long dreary 
ages of savagery follow. At last he discovers the use of fire. 
He discovers these veins of metal in the earth, learns to 
smelt them and turn them into tools and weapons, and then 
— ages of barbarism still. 

I wish to call your attention to some general features, 
such features as the pessimist commonly uses out of which 
to construct the indictment against the wisdom and goodness 
of things. How nany thousands of years, then, during 
which the separate and hostile tribes were engaged in almost 
incessant warfare ! And then, as one step higher, — higher 
because it was substituted for the wholesale, indiscriminate 
slaughter of captives, — there came human slavery for thou- 
sands of years, during which men and women were held by 
force on the part of others, compelled to unremitting and 
unpaid toil ; the rights of neither husband nor wife nor child 
respected, treated like cattle in the open market. 

Then from the beginning all the way up until to-day how 
much of physical pain, every nerve athrill with anguish, the 
head weary, the heart sick and faint ! Make the problem as 
difficult as you will, paint the picture in as dark colors as 
you choose, remember it is true that this side of the picture, 
if you fix your attention on it, cannot be overdrawn. Then 
take one case, the case of death, of separation of friends. 
Let it be the death of a child, of a husband or wife or a life- 
long friend, it matters not whose. I wish to call your atten- 
tion to this problem of death, the heart-ache, the despair, the 
feeling that life is no longer worth keeping because the ob- 
ject of the heart's love has been rent away, this difficulty of 
taking up the burden of life, of walking alone, where one has 
had such dear companionship. This is one case : multiply 
it by hundreds, by thousands, by millions. Make it the age- 



226 Life 

long, the universal experience, and then see how great a 
problem it is when we face this fact of death. 

Turn to another illustrative fact. How many men and 
women there have been in all ages who have walked the 
earth alone, who have had an experience bitterer, if possible, 
than that which I have just described ! for I think all of you 
will agree with Tennyson when he says, — 

" 'Tis better to have loved and lost 
Than never to have loved at all." 

What, then, will you say of those who have walked through 
life in a dream that has never been realized, who have 
thought that they had found the mate, the companion, of 
their soul, and have waked up to find it an illusion, who 
have hoped for satisfactory companionship and have never 
found it, who have been haunted by an ideal of love that 
might satisfy brain and heart and every taste and faculty, — 
a happy dream that has never been turned to fact ? 

Then think of the numbers of men who in all ages have 
pursued what they believed to be some grand object of life 
that has forever eluded them, the number of those who have 
tried to invent something w r hich might help to lift up and 
lead on the world. Visit the Patent Office in Washington, 
and see the hundreds and thousands of models there that 
have never come to any practical result, and then consider 
for a moment how much of thought, how much of dream, 
how much of high hope, how much of bitter disappointment, 
those tongueless models are able to tell ; and that is only 
a fraction of the world-wide, year-long sorrow. Think of the 
men who in the line of their profession or business have 
dreamed that some time they would be in a position to 
accomplish some great thing for the world, to help at least 
their friends or this or that cause, who have lain down at last 



What is it all fort 227 

to fall into their final sleep, seeing the vision ever still in the 
air, something that they have never been able to grasp, some- 
thing that has haunted them, made them restless, and at 
last made them feel that they had struggled in vain, that 
they had been hardly wiser than is the little child who starts 
out on the search for the end of the rainbow, where certain 
good things are promised him if he can only reach it. 

And then survey the scene of human life and pick out the 
great, the noble, the prophets, the witnesses, the teachers, 
the great world-leaders, and see what has been their fate. 
Almost every one of them bitterly thought of, fought by 
those they desired to help ; almost every one of them mis- 
conceived by their own friends, by those who were nearest 
to them, by those from whom, if from any, they might 
expect to have a hand-clasp of sympathy and encourage- 
ment ; struck, beaten in heart as well as in body, by those 
whom they longed to cover with blessing and good. The 
long roll of the world's saints and martyrs, the men that 
have been in prison, the men to whose lips the cup of 
death has been offered, the men about whose limbs the 
flame has curled, the men every joint of whose bodies has 
been racked with torture, the men whom now we praise, we 
love, we call divine, — see what price they have had to pay 
for the unselfishness of making the world a little lighter, a 
little easier place to live in, of breaking the bonds of minds 
and souls ! 

Then look out over the face of civilization to-day. In 
spite of all the progress that has been made, in spite of the 
fact that the world was never so well off as it is now in any 
department, yet never, perhaps, was there such wide-spread 
discontent, so that many are sadly inclined to utter the 
words of the old Hebrew pessimist, who even then told 
the world that "he that increaseth knowledge increaseth 



228 Life 

sorrow." So much discontent is there that many look back 
with weary and aching hearts to the time when, although 
the world was poorer, although there was not such wide- 
spread knowledge as to-day, although there were none of 
the mighty discoveries, none of the means of controlling the 
physical forces of the world, still there was at least, some- 
how, more of animal content than there is to-day. Men, I 
say, look back and wonder if those times were not really 
better than these. 

But I would not have you merely occupy the point of 
view of the pessimist. It has not been all savagery, all 
barbarism, all slavery, all war, all death, all heart-hunger, 
all separation from those that we love, all persecution and 
pain to noble souls. It is not all evil and all discontent 
even at this hour. I only wish, for the purpose that I have 
in mind, to hint to you this darker side, the material out 
of which the common charge against the universe is made, 
and to confess the uttermost truth in it all. But you are 
to remember, in justice to the course of human history, how 
natural and how easy it is for men to fix their attention, as 
they look back over the past, only on the dramatic incidents 
of life, and so to tell themselves a story which is largely false. 
I think there is hardly anything falser than ordinary history. 
It gives you the impression that the world is made up of 
the rise and fall of dynasties, of what are called noble fam- 
ilies, made up of the conflicts, the battles, between kings 
and peoples, made up of diplomatic quarrels ; while all the 
time the facts of general content, of prosperity, of increasing 
good, of quiet human happiness, human love, human peace, 
human hope, are all left one side and forgotten. I believe, 
— I cannot run over the history of men with this point in 
mind, to give you the reasons for my faith, — but I believe 
that, in spite of all that has been said, there has been, from 



What is it all for? 229 

that far-off morning when the first man looked up to heaven 
until to-day, unspeakably more of happiness than there has 
been of unhappiness, unspeakably more of good than there 
has been of evil, unspeakably more of hope than there has 
been of despair, unspeakably more of the divine than there 
has been of the bestial. The simple fact that we are here 
to-day, with this discontent in our hearts, with this hope 
that looks up to the future, with this consciousness of power, 
with this growing control of the planet that we live upon, 
and with this belief that we can master and make the 
future serve us, — all this is demonstration of what I have 
said, that there has been a preponderance of good over evil 
in all the past. 

I wish now, however, while keeping this pessimistic side 
of things in mind, or rather while you survey the whole field 
of human life and human history with which I have been 
dealing in this course of sermons, to ask you to raise with 
me the question whether there is any conceivable outcome 
that can justify all the process that the world is going 
through. If there is such an outcome, what is it ? May we 
have something of hope in our hearts and of strength in our 
arms as we face the further problems of human life ? 

There are those who tell us that there is no outcome, 
who tell us what Macbeth said of human life, that 

" It is a tale 
Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, 
Signifying nothing " ; 

and there are theories that can be held that, to my mind, 
would justify this charge of Macbeth. You will recall, 
perhaps, the opening lines of Milton in " Paradise Lost." 
This problem that I present to you is the same that the 
world has always presented to itself. A little while ago, 



230 Life 

Mr. Mallock roused the public by asking the question, "Is 
life worth living?" It is perpetually coming up. Milton, 
in his opening lines, invokes the divine spirit instead of the 
ancient pagan muse, and asks that power may be given him 
that, as he ascends "to the highth of this great argument," 
he 

" May assert eternal Providence, 
And justify the ways of God to men." 

It is my purpose to present to you three possible theories 
All the theories that you can frame as to the outcome of 
things are only variations of these three. I wish, therefore, 
to present you, in rough, brief outline, these three, to ask 
you which one of them seems the most rational, which you 
will adopt as a working theory of life. 

i. First, the one which still surrounds us on every hand, 
the one which Milton specially outlines as his solution of the 
problem, the theory of " Paradise Lost." This, as you 
know, is none other than the theory of the popular churches, 
and has been for the last millennium and a half. It starts 
with the idea that man is an abortive piece of work, not 
what God intended him ; that he is fallen, ruined. You 
know the outcome. I need not spend time in detailing it, 
It means that, after this brief scene of life here, in which 
each individual soul is supposed to be on probation for an 
eternal and changeless future, a few elected, chosen of God 
from all eternity, are to be gathered like grains of wheat 
from the wheat-field, and taken into God's garner; that 
these few souls are to come into his bright presence and 
share his glory, his joy unutterable, forevermore. But the * 
great majority are to pass from life in their sins, are for 
their punishment to go their way down the abysses of eter- 
nal darkness and eternal punishment. This is the solution 

of Milton. This is the outcome which the orthodox churches 
i 



What is it all for? 231 

offer to us. Ask them what life is for, and this is the reply, 
A little brief life here on earth, heaven for a few, eternal 
pain for the many. The two conditions are fixed, separated 
by a gulf impassable, and to continue forever ; and what for ? 
The old creeds, of which they are now considering the revi- 
sion, tell us that on the one hand a few are saved to illustrate 
God's glory and mercy, and the rest are punished forever to 
illustrate the great glory of his justice. 

Is this a satisfactory theory? Does it make life seem 
worth while to us ? I need not argue this at length. I only 
need to say that there are three elements that make up all 
that is grand and manly in us, and that those three, when 
acting unrestrained, condemn it utterly. It is not satisfac- 
tory to the intellect of man ; for it does not seem a worthy 
scheme of the universe. It does not seem an outcome that 
we love to contemplate as satisfying the mind. 

And, then, the human heart cries out against it, — this 
heart that demands love as the only thing that will satisfy 
it, love not for itself, but for all mankind, for all sentient 
creatures that live. This cannot be accepted unless the 
heart can become so calloused, so hard, as to be happy in 
heaven with the perpetual thought of this other place intrud- 
ing like a shadow on the brightness, like a discord in the 
music. Why, we are becoming so civilized to-day that the 
whole world is roused to indignation at the tales of suffering 
and torture that come to us from Siberian prisons ; and what 
are these ? A few men, a few women, and suffering only 
for a year or two \ and then it is over, and peace, if no more, 
is the outcome of it all. How could thousands of loving, 
tender hearts be happy in heaven while something so much 
worse than Siberian torture was being carried on in the 
prison-house of the universe, — not for a week or a year, but 
forever and ever and ever ? Were such a thing conceivable, 



232 Life 

I think that all loving men and women would kneel before 
the throne of Him that they would no longer dare to call 
Father, and beg at least to share, if they could not alleviate, 
the torment. The heart will not bear it then. 

Then the conscience refuses to accept it, from first to last, 
every fibre, every thread in its warp and woof. The whole 
scheme from inception to close is utterly, hideously unjust. 
There has been no injustice on the face of the earth up to 
that of the worst of those that we call inhuman monsters that 
for one instant can compare with it. If life is for this, then 
the less of it the better ; and any father or mother, it seems 
to me, would commit a crime to add one soul to the already 
too large number of candidates for such a destiny. 

2. There is another theory in answer to the question, 
What is it all for ? the theory of many of the largest-hearted 
humanitarians of the world. It is the theory of Comte, the 
theory so ably represented in England by Mr. Harrison, 
who calls this pre-eminently the religion of humanity. It is 
the theory of many materialistic scientists, the theory that 
man is the only intelligence in the universe, that we have no 
right to speak the word " God " or believe that he exists ; 
that we have no right to speak the word " soul " or believe 
that we are souls \ that we have no right to expect to over- 
leap the gulf of death ; that the only thing for us to do is 
— what we can to make the pathway of humanity easier 
here. This theory holds that humanity is the only conscious 
power in the universe, that it is the product of blind force 
working under the guidance of necessary law. By and by 
the world and all that inhabit it are to pass away like a 
dream, — like a morning mist I was going to say; but no: 
the figure is not strong enough, for the morning mist, though 
it disappears from sight, still endures, — but this is to pass 
away into utter nothingness. When you ask one of these 



What is it all for f 233 

men, then, or any of those who hold any variety of this theory, 
what it is all for, he must answer that in the last resort it is 
for — nothing. 

Picture it, if you can. Recur to the past as I have out- 
lined it, this solar system of ours as growing, the earth be- 
coming a fit habitation for life ; life climbing up from the 
lower forms until man appears, the long barbaric ages, the 
preparation of the planet, the dawning of civilization, the 
discovery of fire, of metals, the partial control of the forces 
of the world, then a great civilization climbing up into the 
light, achieving such results as are still the wonder of their 
descendants, — Greece, Rome, Palestine, the mighty men of 
the past, Confucius, Buddha, Jesus, those who have reigned 
in the field of intellect, the great poets, the great scholars, 
the great discoverers, the great inventors, those by whose 
mastery modern civilization has at last come to begin to con- 
trol these mighty forces of steam, electricity, of which we 
see but the beginning, — the end is not yet, — the world led 
up, going on, every land discovered, every wilderness turned 
into a garden, every waterway a highway for commerce, the 
song of the happy sailors on every sea, the hum of factories 
by every waterfall, or doing their work under the power of 
electricity or steam, the world redeemed, civilized, crime at 
last outgrown, poverty at last put under foot, superstition at 
last superseded, the world one scene of light and laughter 
and joy and peace, men having won perfect control over the 
planet, over themselves, until the grandest dream of the 
world is realized. All this — and then what? Snuffed out 
like a candle, to fall back into utter nothingness again ! 

Does it seem worth while ? Does it commend itself to your 
intellect as worthy of thought ? Does it commend itself to 
your heart as satisfying its infinite longings ? Does it com- 
mend itself to your conscience as just to those who have 



234 Life 

sacrificed and suffered that coming ages might be happy and 
at peace ? It seems to me, friends, that the statement of a 
theory like this is stronger by way of refutation than any- 
thing that can be said concerning it. As Mr. John Fiske has 
said, considered intellectually, such a theory puts the world 
to permanent intellectual confusion. It satisfies no element 
of a high and noble man. And not all the songs of such a 
singer as George Eliot, representing how the individual soul 
becomes one note in the increasing music of humanity, can 
seem to justify it; for, after all, it is nothing at all at the end. 
3. One more theory remains, — which I need not tell you 
is my own, — that starts with the thought that matter was not 
first, but spirit. I do not know but matter may be eternal. 
When I say " first," therefore, I refer to the order of impor- 
tance, not necessarily to the order of time. Matter may, 
for aught I know, be the eternal garment, the eternal ex- 
pression, of the infinite life, — I incline to this view, — but 
spirit, life, at the heart of things, not death, not unconscious- 
ness, a purpose reaching through the ages ; and, in the case 
of every soul that has ever lived, death not the end, only a re- 
birth, — death, whenever and however it comes, only the next 
step in the stairway of eternal ascent. There is time enough, 
time for immortality without our exhausting the possibilities 
of growth that we feel dumbly in us seeking for expression. 
This modern theory of the universe is practical. For the 
first time, it makes immortality a wholly rational thought; 
for it is possible for us to think of infinite advance without 
ever exhausting the universe, ever getting weary, ever get- 
ting through. If we may hold this theory that death is 
not the end, — and I believe that, if it is not yet demon- 
strated, we are on the eve of its demonstration, — then life 
becomes for the first time grandly worth while ; for by this 
theory we are under the law of cause and effect in this 



What is it all for f 235 

world, in regard to the development of each individual soul, 
and, when we step out into the next sphere, still the same 
God, still the same universal rule of cause and effect, still 
the same infinite opportunity, still the same broad field for 
personal culture, personal achievement, personal growth; 
each soul left free under the guidance of God to learn the 
meaning, the sublimity, and win the victory of life for itself ; 
all under the guidance of God, enfolded in his clasping wis- 
dom and love, so that no man in any world can go beyond 
his care, no man can escape his compulsion, that compul- 
sion that does not interfere with freedom, but presses upon 
us with invitation to good, and will teach us the meaning, the 
dignity, the grandeur, the sweetness of life, so that we shall 
choose the right and turn away with loathing from that 
which we have learned to be wrong. 

Is there any fact in all the past that is not easily explica- 
ble in the light of this theory ? For, as I have had occasion 
to tell you in the course of these sermons that I have been 
giving to you, it is inconceivable to us that the body should 
be developed except as the result of effort, the attempt to 
overcome obstacles. It is inconceivable that the mind 
should be developed, that knowledge should be acquired, 
except as the result of experience with ignorance, mistakes, 
failures, the overcoming of obstacles. So it is equally incon- 
ceivable that the moral nature in us should be developed 
except by experience with evil, except as the result of strug- 
gle, as the result of effort, as the result of the overcoming 
of obstacles. 

In the light of this theory, look back ; take the ages of 
the world when they were in the period of savagery and 
barbarism, when life meant so little. They were still under 
the guidance of the same God. Man was ever learning the 
meaning of life. All the struggle, all the battle, and slavery 



236 Life 

and evil of every kind were only helping the culture and 
development of the soul. The soul that was separated 
from the object of its love is conscious that that object of 
love is not lost, but waits somewhere for reunion. That soul 
that walked alone and found no mate is conscious that 
somewhere, somehow, that yearning of the soul shall be 
satisfied. Why, we have learned enough to know that to-day 
heart can answer to heart half-way round the globe ! I be- 
lieve that love is that gravity of souls that will sweep into one 
orbit, sometime and somewhere, all those that belong to- 
gether. 

And so the martyrs, all those who have died for the 
betterment of the race, are somewhere overlooking the scene, 
rejoicing in the results of their pain and their sacrifice, over- 
looking the scene, perhaps, side by side with him of whom 
the New Testament writer says that "for the joy that was 
set before him he endured the cross, despising the shame." 

An outcome like this seems to me grandly worth while ; 
and if we may hold it, as I think we most reasonably may, 
then I for one believe that, looking over the history of the 
world and blinking none of its ugly facts, we may be able to 
discover that in the light of it we may find adequate and 
satisfactory solution to this question, What is it all for ? 

Let me suggest to you one thought more. I have been 
telling you something about the want of the heart, the want 
of the conscience, the want of the brain, their demand for sat- 
isfaction. Now note this one thought ; for it seems to me 
that it is a very profound one, reaching down even to the 
very roots of things, and yet high enough to measure heaven 
itself. On any theory of the universe you please to hold, 
I am here, a thinking being, a being with a conscience that 
demands justice, with a heart that demands love. (I speak 
of myself only as representing the race.) Where did this 



What is it all for? 237 

thought, this conscience, this heart, come from ? It is the 
child and creation of the universe on any theory, whether 
there is a God or is not. There must be something in the 
universe that corresponds to and is capable of producing the 
brain, the conscience, the heart of man. How did they 
come here ? They are here, and are living, eternal witnesses 
to the thought, the conscience, the heart of things, as I be- 
lieve. And they are prophecies, since they are the expression 
of the nature of things, and since they demand the perfect 
thought and love and right. I hold that they are proph- 
ecies of that which the world has been seeking from the 
first, is seeking to-day, and in the nature of things must seek 
forever. 













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